Mrs. Swiggs has (we must return to her mission) scarcely set foot on shore, when, thanks to a little-headed corporation, she is fairly set upon by a dozen or more villanous hack-drivers, each dangling his whip in her face, to the no small danger of her bonnet and spectacles.  They jostle her, utter vile imprecations, dispute for the right of carrying her, each in his turn offering to do it a shilling less.  Lady Swiggs is indeed an important individual in the hands of the hack-drivers, and by them, in a fair way of being torn to pieces.  She wonders they do not recognize her as a distinguished person, from the chivalric State of South Carolina.  The captain is engaged with his ship, passengers are hurrying ashore, too anxious to escape the confinement of the cabin; every one seems in haste to leave her, no one offers to protect her from the clutches of those who threaten to tear her into precious pieces.  She sighs for Sister Slocum, for Mr. Hadger, for any one kind enough to raise a friendly voice in her behalf.  Now one has got her black box, another her corpulent carpet-bag-a third exults in a victory over her band-box.  Fain would she give up her mission in disgust, return to the more aristocratic atmosphere of Charleston, and leave the heathen to his fate.  All this might have been avoided had Sister Slocum sent her carriage.  She will stick by her black box, nevertheless.  So into the carriage with it she gets, much discomfited.  The driver says he would drive to the Mayor’s office “and ’ave them ar two coves what’s got the corpulent carpet-bag and the band-box, seed after, if it wern’t that His Honor never knows anything he ought to know, and is sure to do nothing.  They’ll turn up, Mam, I don’t doubt,” says the man, “but it’s next to los’in’ on ’em, to go to the Mayor’s office.  Our whole corporation, Mam, don’t do nothin’ but eats oysters, drinks whiskey, and makes presidents;—­them’s what they do, Marm.”  Lady Swiggs says what a pity so great a city was not blessed with a bigger-headed corporation.

“That it is, Marm,” returns the methodical hack-driver, “he an’t got a very big head, our corporation.”  And Lady Swiggs, deprived of her carpet-bag and band-box, and considerably out of patience, is rolled away to the mansion of Sister Slocum, on Fourth Avenue.  Instead of falling immediately into the arms and affections of that worthy and very enterprising lady, the door is opened by a slatternly maid of all work-her greasy dress, and hard, ruddy face and hands-her short, flabby figure, and her coarse, uncombed hair, giving out strong evidence of being overtaxed with labor.  “Is it Mrs. Slocum hersel’ ye’d be seein’?” inquires the maid, wiping her soapy hands with her apron, and looking querulously in the face of the old lady, who, with the air of a Scotch metaphysician, says she is come to spend a week in friendly communion with her, to talk over the cause of the poor, benighted heathen.  “Troth an’ I’m not as sure ye’ll do that same, onyhow; sure she’d