A PLEASANT passage of sixty hours, a good shaking up at the hands of that old tyrant¹, sea-sickness, and Lady Swiggs finds the steamer on which she took passage gliding² majestically³ up New York Bay. There she sits, in all her dignity, an embodiment of our decayed chivalry⁴, a fair representative of our first families. She has taken up her position on the upper deck, in front of the wheel house. As one after another the objects of beauty that make grand the environs of that noble Bay, open to her astonished eyes, she contrasts them favorably or unfavorably with some familiar object in Charleston harbor. There is indeed a similarity in the conformation. And though ours, she says, may not be so extensive, nor so grand in its outlines, nor so calm and soft in its perspective, there is a more aristocratic air about it. Smaller bodies are always more select and respectable. The captain, to whom she has put an hundred and one questions which he answers in monosyllables, is not, she thinks, so much of a gentleman as he might have been had he been educated in Charleston. He makes no distinction in favor of people of rank.

 

Lady Swiggs wears that same faded silk dress; her black crape bonnet⁵, with two saucy⁶ red artificial flowers tucked in at the side, sits so jauntily⁷; that dash of brown hair is smoothed so exactly over her yellow, shrivelled forehead; her lower jaw⁸ oscillates with increased motion; and her sharp, gray eyes, as before, peer anxiously through her great-eyed spectacles. And, generous reader, that you may not mistake her, she has brought her inseparable Milton, which she holds firmly grasped in her right hand. "You have had a tedious time of it, Madam," says a corpulent lady, who is extensively dressed and jewelled, and

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