After their return to New York, in the spring of 1870, Aunt Mary invited Mr. Hempstead to visit them at Chappaqua, as she felt under some obligations to him for having given her his state-room, and subsequently executed some little commissions for her, between New York and Nassau.  He came out here, and made a visit of a week.  In July of the same year.  Aunt Mary and Ida went abroad, and from that time the acquaintance dropped.  That he admired Ida know, but how any one could manufacture an engagement from such slight material, I cannot imagine.

One day last summer, during the excitement of the campaign, I had taken up a rose-tinted society journal as a little respite from politics, when my eyes fell upon a paragraph announcing Ida’s engagement to Mr. William Hempstead, Purser of the Missouri; and then I for the first time learnt the officer’s name.  My astonishment can be imagined; and to this day it remains an enigma who invented that little society item.  If a fertile-minded reporter had desired to head his column of Engagements in High Life with Ida’s name, and had announced that she would shortly be led to the hymeneal altar (I believe that is the correct phrase in newspaper parlance) by any one in our circle of acquaintances with whom she was at all intimate, it would not have been surprising; but why a person whom she had not seen or heard of for two years should have been selected, is a mystery worthy of G. P. R. James.

But in writing about Mr. Hempstead, I have neglected his sister.  Miss Hempstead was a tall, fine-looking young girl, with, however, a strikingly foreign appearance for an American pur sang.  She was born, she told me, in Belize, Central America, where her father was United States Consul.  A tropical sun had given her a complexion of Spanish darkness, heightened by large black eyes and jet black hair—­the exact counterpart, Ida afterwards told me, of her brother, who was often mistaken for a Cuban.

When the period of the consulate of Mr. Hempstead pere was over, he had become so much attached to Belize, that he decided to make it his future residence.  His daughter said she could not imagine what he found to like in the place, for between earthquakes and yellow fever, one was in a continual state of terror; there was no society, the population being almost entirely negro, and no schools; consequently the children of the few white resident families were obliged to go to England or to the United States to be educated.

Miss Hempstead was sent to London, and five or six years of the discipline of a first-class English school have made her quite different from the fully fledged society queens who graduate from our Murray Hill pensionnats at sixteen or so.  A little English reserve to tone down somewhat their sparkling natures is all that our bewitching American girls need to make them perfect, but I fear they will for several years yet bear the stigma of, “Charming, but too wild.”