"Mr. Belmont," said Julia, with sparkling eyes, and a voice of unusual animation, "although there are sordid souls in this world, who only judge of the merits of an individual by his pecuniary possessions, I am not one of that number. I respect poverty; there is something highly poetical about it, and I imagine that happiness is oftener found in the humble cottage than beneath the palace roof."
Belmont appeared enchanted with this encouraging avowal. The next day, after cautioning his friend Charley to say nothing of his actual circumstances, he called on the widow Heathcote and her fair daughter in the character of the "poor gentleman." The widow had very different notions from her romantic offspring, and when Belmont candidly confessed his poverty on soliciting permission to address Julia, he was very politely requested to change the subject, and never mention it again.
The result of all this manœuvring was an elopement; the belle of the ball jumping out of a chamber window on a shed, and coming down a flight of steps to reach her lover, for the sake of being romantic, when she might just as well have walked out of the front door.
The happy couple passed a day in New York city, and then Frank took his beloved to his "cottage."
An Irish hack conveyed them to a miserable shanty in the environs of New York, where they alighted, and Frank, escorting the bride into the apartment which served for parlor, kitchen, and drawing room, and was neither papered nor carpeted, introduced her to his mother, much in the way Claude Melnotte presents Pauline. The old woman, who was peeling potatoes, hastily wiped her hands and face with a greasy apron, and saluted her "darter," as she called her, on both cheeks.
"Can it be possible," thought Julia, "that this vulgar creature is my Belmont's mother?"
"Frank!" screamed the old woman, "you'd better go right up stairs and take off them clothes—for the boy's been sent arter 'em more'n fifty times. Frank borried them clothes, ma'am," she added to Julia, by way of explanation, "to look smart when he went down east."
The bridegroom retired on this hint, and soon reappeared in a pair of faded nankeen pantaloons, reaching to about the calf of the leg, a very shabby black coat, out at the elbows, a ragged black vest, and, instead of his varnished leather boots, a pair of immense cowhide brogans.
"Now," said he, sitting quietly down by the cooking stove, "I begin to feel at home. Ah! this is delightful, isn't it, dearest?" and he warbled,—
"Though never so humble, there's no place like home."