for their amusement or more material advantages; that his marriage
to an heiress - meaning to them the re-opening of a long-closed
CHATEAU and the beginning of a period of prosperity for the
district - should excite his neighbors is not to be wondered at.

It is well known that whole regions have been made prosperous by
the residence of a court, witness the wealth and trade brought into
Scotland by the Queen's preference for "the Land of Cakes," and the
discontent and poverty in Ireland from absenteeism and persistent
avoidance of that country by the court. But in this land, where
every reason for interesting one class in another seems lacking,
that thousands of well-to-do people (half the time not born in this
hemisphere), should delightedly devour columns of incorrect
information about New York dances and Lenox house-parties, winter
cruises, or Newport coaching parades, strikes the observer as the
"unexpected" in its purest form.

That this interest exists is absolutely certain. During a trip in
the West, some seasons ago, I was dumbfounded to find that the
members of a certain New York set were familiarly spoken of by
their first names, and was assailed with all sorts of eager
questions when it was discovered that I knew them. A certain young
lady, at that time a belle in New York, was currently called SALLY,
and a well-known sportsman FRED, by thousands of people who had
never seen either of them. It seems impossible, does it not? Let
us look a little closer into the reason of this interest, and we
shall find how simple is the apparent paradox.

Perhaps in no country, in all the world, do the immense middle
classes lead such uninteresting lives, and have such limited