But in an evil hour, during a fortnight's relaxation at the Catskill Mountain House, this steady and respectable gentleman, at the mature age of thirty-five, quite an old bachelor indeed, fell desperately in love with a dashing girl of twenty, the orphan daughter of a bankrupt ship chandler. Miss Maria Manners was highly educated; that is, she could write short notes on perfumed billet paper, without making any orthographical or grammatical mistakes, had taken three quarters' lessons of a French barber, could work worsted lapdogs and embroider slippers, danced like a sylph, and played on the piano indifferently well. She had visited the Catskills on a matrimonial speculation, and made a dead set at poor Brandon. Of course with his experience in the ways of women, he fell a ready dupe to the fascinating wiles of Miss Manners. She kept him in an agony of suspense for a week, during every evening of which she waltzed with a young lieutenant of dragoons, who was playing billiards and drinking champagne on a sick leave, until she could hear from a fabulous guardian at Philadelphia, and obtain his consent to a sacrifice of her brilliant prospects—nothing a year and a very suspicious account at a fashionable milliner's.
Mr. Brandon went down to the city, purchased a snug house, furnished it modestly, gave a liberal order on his tailor, and one memorable morning, might have been seen looking very uncomfortable, in a white satin stock and kids, beside a lady elegantly dressed in satin and blonde lace, while a portly clergyman pronounced his sentence in the shape of a marriage benediction.
There was a snug wedding breakfast in the new house, at which were present several eminent apple speculators from Fulton market, two or three bank clerks, and a reporter for a weekly newspaper, who consumed a ruinous amount of sandwiches and bottled ale.
Before the honeymoon was over, the bride began to display some of the less amiable features of her character. She sneered at the situation and simplicity of the establishment, and protested she was unaccustomed to that sort of style. She was perfectly sincere in this, for the defunct ship chandler had lived in a basement and two attic chambers.
By dint of repeated persecutions, she induced her husband to move into a larger house; and finally, after the expiration of many years, we find them established in the upper part of the city, in a splendid mansion, looking out upon a fashionable square, with a little marble boy in front sitting on a brick, and spouting a stream of Croton through a clam shell.
One morning, Mr. Brandon came home about eleven o'clock. On entering his front door, he beheld, lounging on a sofa, with the Courrier des Etats Unis in his hand, Claude, the handsome French page of Mrs. B.
"Where is Mrs. B.?" asked the elderly broker.
"Madame is in her boudoir," replied the page; "but," he added, seeing his master move in that direction, "I do not know whether she is visible."
"That I will ascertain myself, young gentleman," replied the broker, with a slight shade of irony in his tone. "But tell me, is there any one with her?"
"Only M. Auguste Charmant," said the page.