their heroism.  I believe there are men who have shown as much self-devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to the supper-table as ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized his name.  There are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing can hold back from their errands of mercy.  They find out the red-handed, gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the green herb.  They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-room.  I have known one of these angels ask, of her own accord, that a desolate middle-aged man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be presented to her by the hostess.  He wore no shirt-collar,—­he had on black gloves,—­and was flourishing a red bandanna handkerchief!  Match me this, ye proud children of poverty, who boast of your paltry sacrifices for each other!  Virtue in humble life!  What is that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in pearls and diamonds?  As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before the social mendicant,—­the white billows of her beauty heaving under the foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,—­I should have wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.

I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of our fellow-citizens.  It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always been what might be called in general terms a gentleman.  But what if at some future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on whom that lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed?  This may happen,—­how soon the future only knows.  Think of this miserable man of coming political possibilities,—­an unpresentable boor sucked into office by one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which carry straws and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf of political oblivion!  Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze of good society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in one great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern!  No,—­there will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield the victim of free institutions from himself and from his torturers.  I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife which he would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance of food,—­or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by imitating his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it into her bosom, like Lucretia!