A pair of young men, unacquainted with each other, pressed at the same time to the punch-bowl, and Jack, the chief ladler, turning from the younger, a clerk in civil dress, helped the elder, a tall naval officer, to a couple of glasses.  The clerk, young Utie, who was somewhat flushed, addressed the chief ladler and remarked: 

“You dam nigger, didn’t you see my glass?”

“See it, sah?  Yes!  I’ve seen it seval times afo, dis evening.”

Black Jack then received the current allowance of curses for his color and his impudence, all of which he took meekly, till the officer, Lieutenant Dibdo, interrupted on the negro’s behalf.

“It’s none o’ yo affair, I reckon!” cried Utie sullenly.

“The man had no intention of slighting you,” said Dibdo.  “You have been drinking too much, boy, and your coarseness is coming out.”

A fresh crowd of thirsty people pressing up at this point gave Jack his opportunity to cry:  “Room around de punch-bowl!”

And the disputants were separated and squeezed by the promenading tides into different rooms.

The officer presently forgot all about it, but not so young Utie, who was partly drunk, entirely vain, not a gentleman by nature, and outraged that anybody had dubbed him “a boy.”  He sought the side of a fine young girl, the daughter of the chief of the bureau where he was employed, and with whom he was in love.  She was attired in the free costume of republican receptions—­bare arms, a low dress giving ample display to the whitest shoulders in the room, and fine natural hair dressed with flowers.  Every gentleman who passed her during the evening had looked his homage freely—­old beaux, dignitaries, officers, foreign deputies, roues—­and as she had been two or three winters in that kind of society, nothing discomposed her.

“Robert,” she said, with part of a glance, as Utie rejoined her, “you go to the punch-bowl too much.  You reflect upon me, sir.  Besides, I heard you quarrelling with that handsome officer.  I am dying to know him.  Who is he?”

Utie looked viciously up, anger and jealousy inflaming his heated face, for, although he had no engagement with Miss Rideau, he conceived himself her future suitor.  But some rash words that he said against the officer were scarcely heard by the self-possessed beauty of official society, because, just then, the young officer and a friend were approaching them.  She dropped her eyes when she met Lieutenant Dibdo’s bold glance of admiration, perhaps in order not to be privy to the more searching look with which, like a gentleman of the world, he ran over the fine points of her plump body as he passed.  But young Utie, seeing the offender of a moment ago taking such ardent and leisurely survey of the girl under his care, turned pale with hate.  The officer did not notice him at all, absorbed in the fine colors, eyes, and proportions of Miss Rideau, and this further outraged Utie who—­to his credit be it said—­had only modest thoughts for her.  When he saw, however, that she looked after the manly figure and naval gilt of him of the profane eyes, as if to return his admiration, the intoxicated boy dropped an oath.