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LADY BLOOMFIELD. 223 After immense exertions, one of the boots was got off, but no amount of force could stir the "other, and, mean- while, the Queen was coming nearer and nearer. The Lord Mayor was in an agony of fright, with one boot off and the other on, until at last he was almost beside him- self, and shouted : " For heaven's sake put my boot on again ! " This was done just as the Queen came up, and the poor man was obliged to wear the tight boots in torment all through the long banquet before he could divest himself of his incongruous and agonizing terminations. People in England are fond of relating such anecdotes of the Mayor and Aldermen of London. Sir Robert Peel told another story to the ladies of the court of a Lord Mayor's dinner, when Mr. Canning sat oppo&it^ Alder- man Flower, a man of great note in the city. The Alderman said to Canning: " Mr. Canning, my Lord Ellenborough was a man of uncommon sagacity." The great orator bowed assent, and asked the Alder man why he happened to make the remark just then. "Why, sir," said Flower, " had he been here, he would have told me by a single glance of his eye which is the best of those five haunches of venison." Soon after, Lord Ellenborough himself came to court, and he told the ladies a comic tale of another Lord Mayor's dinner. The Duke of Wellington being called upon to propose the health of the Lady Mayoress, who happened to be a little, dried-up old woman, he spoke of her as "the model of her sex." After dinner, Ellen- borough asked the Iron Duke how he could call that ugly little thing the model of her sex. "What could I call her?" said the Duke; "I had never seen her before." Our maid-of-honor held her office for about three years,