I have never known such griefs as my grief that day. I hung round the outside of that tent as sinners are supposed to hang round the walls of Heaven. I heard the music and the hip-hips and the cheers and the snaps of the whips, and in my desperation I tried to look under the canvass, but was detected in the act by the monster at the door, and obliged to fly for my life. I have never known a grief so poignant as that.
I pity the man who has not sinned in his boyhood, all for a circus. He has missed one of the luxuries of life which can hardly find compensation in an æon of virtue.
June 15, 1867.
[BEFORE THE WEDDING.]
I HAVE already intimated in these columns that Aurelia is about to be married. Young Peplum, who is so well known as the gentlemanly clerk at ——'s dry goods store, and who is heir apparent to a snug hundred thousand, when his uncle dies, is the fortunate man who will have the pleasure of supplying her with millinery hereafter, and of being known as the husband of Mrs. Aurelia ——.
Aurelia, at present, is in a frightful crisis of dry goods, and is driving to the very verge of distraction a score of dress-makers, milliners and cloak-makers, who are sitting around the house like so many Patiences on monuments. Fractions of bridal dresses, traveling dresses, morning wrappers, cloaks, basques and basquines, immaculate and mysterious white garments with the most spirituel ruffles and frills foaming over them, cobwebby handkerchiefs and articles in the sanctum sanctorum of the toilet, the meaning of which I suspect but dare not mention—are all over the house from the garret to the cellarage; on chairs, on tables, on beds, on the piano, on lounges, on everything. I had rather undertake to walk through an acre of eggs, without breaking one of them, than to go through the house without setting my No. 11 boot heel into some frail gossamer of a dress, and rending its gauzy fabric and Aurelia's heart at the same time.