Are met in a well-curtained, warm CABINET,
Overlooking a street there, which every one knows.
The dinner is done, the Lafitte in its basket,
The champagne in its cooler is passed in gay haste;
Whatever you wish for, you have but to ask it;
Here are coffee, cigars and liqueurs, to your taste.—O. Meredith.
While the young, forsaken wife was occupying her lonely hours with these simple pursuits, and waiting from day to day to hear from her faithless husband, and hoping against hope to see him, events were transpiring in Washington calculated to have an important influence on her destiny. They were but trifles in themselves, however momentous in their effects. They were only a few bachelors’ wine suppers, card parties, and such like means of ruin. But that fate hangs upon trifles, is a truth as old as the history of Eden lost for an apple.
This was the way of it:
After Mr. Richard Hammond had received his final dismissal from Miss Anna Lyon, “that unlucky dog,” as his uncle called him, “fell among thieves.”
Fell among thieves. That is the best way to characterize his misfortune in sinking again into the society of that dissipated set of men who ate his dinners, drank his wines, won his money, demoralized his habits and destroyed his reputation.