“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.
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
