“Well, I don’t know, sir.  It—­well, it appears to me—­to be dubious enough.”

“Du—­leave the house!  I am a ruined man.  Those Humboldt savages never will forgive me for tangling their brains up with this inhuman letter.  I have lost the respect of the Methodist Church, the board of aldermen—­”

“Well, I haven’t anything to say about that, because I may have missed it a little in their cases, but I was too many for the Baldwin’s Ranch people, General!”

“Leave the house!  Leave it forever and forever, too.”

I regarded that as a sort of covert intimation that my service could be dispensed with, and so I resigned.  I never will be a private secretary to a senator again.  You can’t please that kind of people.  They don’t know anything.  They can’t appreciate a party’s efforts.

A fashion item—­[Written about 1867.]

At General G——­’s reception the other night, the most fashionably dressed lady was Mrs. G. C. She wore a pink satin dress, plain in front but with a good deal of rake to it—­to the train, I mean; it was said to be two or three yards long.  One could see it creeping along the floor some little time after the woman was gone.  Mrs. C. wore also a white bodice, cut bias, with Pompadour sleeves, flounced with ruches; low neck, with the inside handkerchief not visible, with white kid gloves.  She had on a pearl necklace, which glinted lonely, high up the midst of that barren waste of neck and shoulders.  Her hair was frizzled into a tangled chaparral, forward of her ears, aft it was drawn together, and compactly bound and plaited into a stump like a pony’s tail, and furthermore was canted upward at a sharp angle, and ingeniously supported by a red velvet crupper, whose forward extremity was made fast with a half-hitch around a hairpin on the top of her head.  Her whole top hamper was neat and becoming.  She had a beautiful complexion when she first came, but it faded out by degrees in an unaccountable way.  However, it is not lost for good.  I found the most of it on my shoulder afterward. (I stood near the door when she squeezed out with the throng.) There were other ladies present, but I only took notes of one as a specimen.  I would gladly enlarge upon the subject were I able to do it justice.

RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT

One of the best men in Washington—­or elsewhere—­is Riley, correspondent of one of the great San Francisco dailies.

Riley is full of humor, and has an unfailing vein of irony, which makes his conversation to the last degree entertaining (as long as the remarks are about somebody else).  But notwithstanding the possession of these qualities, which should enable a man to write a happy and an appetizing letter, Riley’s newspaper letters often display a more than earthly solemnity, and likewise an unimaginative devotion to petrified facts, which surprise and distress all men who know