to the successive chiefs and employes.  Once it was true that he had been summarily removed by a new Secretary, to make room for a camp follower, whose exhaustive and intellectual services in a political campaign had made him eminently fit for anything; but the alarming discovery that the new clerk’s knowledge of grammar and etymology was even worse than that of the Secretary himself, and that, through ignorance of detail, the business of that department was retarded to a damage to the Government of over half a million of dollars, led to the reinstatement of Mr. Fauquier—­at A lower salary.  For it was felt that something was wrong somewhere, and as it had always been the custom of Congress and the administration to cut down salaries as the first step to reform, they made of Mr. Fauquier a moral example.  A gentleman born, of somewhat expensive tastes, having lived up to his former salary, this change brought another bread-winner into the field, Mrs. Fauquier, who tried, more or less unsuccessfully, to turn her old Southern habits of hospitality to remunerative account.  But as poor Fauquier could never be prevailed upon to present a bill to a gentleman, sir, and as some of the scions of the best Southern families were still waiting for, or had been recently dismissed from, a position, the experiment was a pecuniary failure.  Yet the house was of excellent repute and well patronized; indeed, it was worth something to see old Fauquier sitting at the head of his own table, in something of his ancestral style, relating anecdotes of great men now dead and gone, interrupted only by occasional visits from importunate tradesmen.

Prominent among what Mr. Fauquier called his “little family” was a black-eyed lady of great powers of fascination, and considerable local reputation as a flirt.  Nevertheless, these social aberrations were amply condoned by a facile and complacent husband, who looked with a lenient and even admiring eye upon the little lady’s amusement, and to a certain extent lent a tacit indorsement to her conduct.  Nobody minded Hopkinson; in the blaze of Mrs. Hopkinson’s fascinations he was completely lost sight of.  A few married women with unduly sensitive husbands, and several single ladies of the best and longest standing, reflected severely on her conduct.  The younger men of course admired her, but I think she got her chief support from old fogies like ourselves.  For it is your quiet, self-conceited, complacent, philosophic, broad-waisted paterfamilias who, after all, is the one to whom the gay and giddy of the proverbially impulsive, unselfish sex owe their place in the social firmament.  We are never inclined to be captious; we laugh at as a folly what our wives and daughters condemn as a fault; our “withers are unwrung,” yet we still confess to the fascinations of a pretty face.  We know, bless us, from dear experience, the exact value of one woman’s opinion of another; we want our brilliant little friend to shine; it is