nian maidens, each of them carrying a tobacco-plant in her hand instead of a lily; and then his own daughter—Nina by name—a girl as beautiful as Venus herself, is to enter in the dress of a rich tobacco-planter’s daughter, and to dance a sola, at the conclusion of which, she is to step up to the dear young visiter, and offer him a pinch of genuine Spanish snuff from a mother of pearl shell.—But the dowager, Mrs President, is to surpass them all. Her old lover, the colonel of engineers, is to get up a grand display of fire-works in her gardens; the cyphers of the illustrious stranger are to be displayed in blue coloured illumination; and at the close of the exhibition, when the bouquet is fired, and while amid the roar and hiss of a thousand squibs and sky-rockets, every body is blinded and confounded, the beautiful Carita, the youngest daughter of the hostess, is to appear to descend, from the dark sky in an ingenious contrivance, surrounded by a magical halo, and under the form of a Psyche, is to present her bridegroom in spe with a glittering diploma of immortality!”
“I will not go to Klarenburg,” muttered I secretly to myself, while my cheeks burned as if one of the colonel’s rockets had passed near it.
“And the best part of the joke,” began the inveterate talker, “I warrant you will be, that the dear young councillor will have none of all the beauties whom the provident papas and mammas are preparing to set before him in such engaging attitudes!”
“And why not?” inquired half-a-dozen voices, with some earnestness. “How know you that?” said they, drawing their chairs closer to the speaker,—a motion which I unconsciously imitated.
“Why,” continued this man of universal acquaintance with men, women, and measures; “the thing I confess to you, my friends, is not quite clear to myself; but what I have heard whispered is this. Old Mrs Milbirn has bequeathed a legacy of fifty thousand crowns to the poor-funds of
