fabric of marvellous fineness, with a sash and streamers of blue, and the light fleecy curls of her hair unadorned save by a slight pendent spray of jasmines.  Her cousin’s dress, though in reality less costly, was more striking, being composed of materials and colors which admirably harmonized with the darkness and richness of her beauty.  Her lustrous black hair was arranged as usual; but a wreath, formed of some delicate vine hung thick with drooping scarlet blossoms, ran like flowering flame around her head.  Like the sumptuous exotic of Zenobia, it was an ornament which seemed to bloom out of the character of the woman.

Bessie cast about her bright, innocent looks of girlish curiosity, which yet shrank from any chance encounter with the furtive glance or cool stare of admiration.  Zelma sat motionless and impassive.  Her eyes wandered naturally, but coldly, over the audience, seeming to take no cognizance of any face, strange or familiar; but when they were lifted above the crowd, to the old carved ceiling of the hall, or dropped upon the beautiful hands which lay listlessly folded in her lap, the cold, blank look she had set against the world went out of them.  Then, in their mystic depths of brooding, introverted thought, new spheres of life, rarer, brighter, fairer, seemed rounding into form and dawning like stars.

Mrs. Margery Burleigh sat with her face turned from the stage, to dissemble the secret impatience with which she awaited the uprolling of the curtain, and slowly waved to and fro a huge, flowered fan, which charged the air with a heavy Indian perfume.

At length, soft, mournful music arose from the orchestra, and every heart stirred to the premonitory waver and lift of the curtain.  Slowly it rose, and discovered a mourning apartment, with a lady in mourning, sitting in a mourning chair, and attended by a mourning maid.  The play was Congreve’s tragedy of “The Mourning Bride,” one of the best of a class of sentimental and stiltified dramatic productions which the public of our great-grandfathers meekly accepted,—­quaffing the frothy small-beer of rant and affectation, in lieu of deep draughts of Nature and passion, the rich, red wine of human life, poured generously forth by the dramatists of a better era.  The excesses of fashion then prevailing, hoops, high heels, powder, and patches, were not more essentially absurd and artificial than such representations of high-life and high-tragedy.

“The Mourning Bride” contains a few situations in which real passion can have play, some fine points and poetic passages, and its moral tone is at least respectable,—­not great things to say of a famous tragedy, certainly, but they give it an honorable distinction over many plays of its time.  There figure in it one or two characters which can be made interesting, and even impressive, by uncommon power in the actor; though they were usually given, at the period of which I write, in a manner sufficiently tame to suit the dullest of courts,—­likely to disturb neither my lord in his napping nor my lady in her prim flirting.