by madam to unearth your dead.  Now to people who know little and care less about their great, great, great grandfather, all this is very amusing.  If the Bible be true, and who can doubt it? there was an ark built in which God’s chosen were placed for safety.  Now any one is safe in saying “my ancestry dates from the ark” but I think it would be rather difficult for a person to trace their ancestry from the time the chosen few stepped from the ark to dry land, down to the present time.  But every one has some imagination, and in order to gratify Madam Snob’s curiosity, just make use of it.  Tell her some were hanged, some were drowned, some were in prison for debt, one fought in the War of the Roses, one was killed in a street brawl, another hanged for treason.  Tell her—­well tell her anything that will satisfy her curiosity, for there are times when an elastic conscience is excusable.  There is another Madam Snob, who not knowing in the slightest degree what constitutes a lady, is ignorant of the fact that a lady is civil to everyone; this madam is uncivil to her servants, but does not hesitate to gossip with them, is careless, in speech and manner, in the presence of inferiors, in fact is guided wholly in matters of civility by the position in which the people are in, whom she is with; is constantly talking of society, and turning up her aristocratic nose at trades-people and in nine cases out of ten, her father was a cobbler, or kept a peanut stand, neither of which would do her any harm, if she only knew that “silence is golden.”  We say, that is the lowest form of snob feminine and rarely met with.

There is another form of snobbery which is not so easily recognized, and requires a good judge of human nature to detect.  This Madam Snob is one who should be a lady, for by education and good breeding she is entitled to the name.  Now, she really possess a good, kind heart, is kind to the poor, tries to do her duty, but away down, under several layers of good intentions, there is a little taint of snobbery, and she really has not the moral courage to rid herself of it.  This Mrs. Snob may have a large circle of friends, but to each one she accords a different reception; to all she is kind, remember, but you can judge of her opinion of different ones, from the invitations which she issues.  First in her estimation, come the fashionable people, those she asks to her dinner parties; then the people whose position in life is not very good, she asks to luncheon; then at last, come those whom she really does not know how to place, and they are the ones she asks to meet her alone.

Now this poor woman, for whom I have a degree of pity, not unmixed with contempt, is in a constant struggle with herself, in her desire to do what she thinks to be right, and at the same time, do everything that her neighbors do, for she is bound hand and foot and dare not make an independent move.  But if Mrs. Fitznoodle were to do certain things, Mrs. Fitzsnob would follow her example, and the people who are asked to meet their hostess—­alone, might find themselves seated around the mahogany with Mr. and Mrs. Fitznoodle and daughters and a select circle of little Noodles.