"Charming this choice blossom of true civilization, blooming amid the desert of barbarism around it! Had a violet or a forget-me-not appeared to us in the centre of Ibrahim Khan's courtyard, the sight would scarcely have been more suggestive. What memories it revives! One of them—
"When the fascinating Lady F. Macarthy, an authoress and a femme d'esprit, had sketched with a pencil, stolen from Wit, the character of her bosom friend, Miss Anne Clotworthy Crawley, and published the same, the English world laughed, but Dublin joyed with double joy.
"Dublin joyed thus: firstly, at seeing the picture; secondly, at foreseeing the scene it would occasion when the sketcher and the sketched met for the first time in public. There was much of anticipation, much of vague and happy expectation, in this idea.
"Was it disappointed?
"No! At the next ball, Lady Florence, unwilling to show Miss Crawley that she could not use as well as abuse a friend, and Miss Crawley, as unwilling to show Lady Florence her consciousness of having been abused as she deserved, both with one impulse at the same moment clave the crowd, and—they had been parted at least five days—kissed each other with all the ardour of feminine friendship.
"'And faith,' said every Irishman of the hundred who witnessed the scene—'and 'faith, I disp'hised them both!'
"Kiss on, Kakoo Mall and Hari Chand!
"At the end of the time the host motions away his pipe, and prepares himself to converse and hor! hor! with renewed vigour.