small table and two or three chairs; and if the orator of the evening,
like a _primo tenore_, had been surveying the house through the
friendly chinks of the pastoral landscape, he would have felt a warm
suffusion of pleasure that his name should be the magic spell to
summon an audience so fair, so numerous, and so intelligent.

There were ushers who showed ladies to seats, and with their
dress-coats and bright badges looked like a milder Metropolitan
police. But no greater force was presumed to be required of them than
pressing aside a too discursive crinoline. In the soft, ample light,
as the audience sat with fluttering ribbons and bright gems and
splendid silks and shawls, so tranquilly expectant, so calmly smiling,
so shyly blushing (if, haply, in all that crowd there were a pair of
lovers!), it was hard to believe that civil war was wasting the land,
and that at the very moment some of those glad hearts were broken--but
would not know it until the sad news came. Yet it was easy, in the
same glance, to feel that even the terrible shape that we thought we
had eluded forever did not seem, after all, so terrible; that even
civil war might be shaking the gates and the guests still smile in the
chambers.

But while leaning against the wall, under the balcony, the Easy Chair
looks around upon the humming throng and thinks of camps far away, and
beating drums and wild alarms and sweeping squadrons of battle, there
is a sudden hush and a simultaneous glance towards one side of the
house, and there, behind the seats at the side, and making for the
stage door, marches a procession, two and two, very solemn, very bald,
very gray, and in evening dress. They are the invited guests, the
honored citizens of Brooklyn, the reverend clergy, and others; a body
of substantial, intelligent, decorous persons. They disappear for a