Next morning the Morning Post will serve up to its (mostly lady) readers a full list of the names of those who were at last night's balls, under the head of "Fashionable Entertainments." The Post is the one daily paper that systematically goes in for this kind of news, publishing every day during the season a long list of coming fixtures, as well as catalogues of the guests attending them. And I fear it must be owned that there are people not a few who take delight in having their parties and appearances chronicled in this small-beer manner, and that there are several grains of truth contained in the good-humoredly sarcastic lines in which that clever rhymer "C.S.C," parodying the Proverbial Philosophy of Mr. Tupper, gives worldly advice to young ladies entering society. Says "C.S.C.":
Choose judiciously thy friends, for to discard them is undesirable;
Yet it is better to drop thy friends, O my daughter, than to drop thy H's.
Dost thou know a wise woman? yea, wiser than the children of light?
Hath she a position? and a title? and are her parties in the Morning Post?
If thou dost, cleave unto her, and give up unto her thy body and mind;
Think with her ideas, and distribute thy smiles at her bidding:
So shalt thou become like unto her, and thy manners shall be "formed:"
And thy name shall be a sesame at which the doors of the great shall fly open:
Thou, shalt know every peer, his arms, and the date of his creation,
His pedigree and their intermarriages, and cousins to the sixth remove;
Thou shalt kiss the hand of royalty, and lo! in next morning's papers,
Side by side with rumors of wars and stories of shipwrecks and sieges,
Shall appear thy name, and the minutiae of thy headdress and petticoat,
For an enraptured public to muse upon over their matutinal muffin.
Society expects every guest after a dance to go through the form of paying a call upon the giver. If you are an old friend of the house, or for any reason want to go in, it will be wise to defer your visit for two or three days, until the interior of the house has recovered its normal condition; for of course on the very day that follows a dance the rooms are in such a universal state of up-side-downness (if the word may be coined) that callers can't expect to be admitted. For which reason, if you don't want to go in, you can't do better than select this very day for leaving a card at the door; which last ceremony duly concluded, all possible respect and duty may be taken to have been shown and done to the private ball: at all events, the present writer—rejoice, long-suffering reader, if you still exist—has no further word or suggestion to offer, on this occasion, on the subject.
W. D. R.
THE LIVELIES.
IN TWO PARTS.—I.
"What under the canopy is all that hammering at the door?" said Mrs. Lively, glancing up from her crocheting.
Master Napoleon Lively, the person appealed to, was sucking a lemon through a stick of candy. He took this from his mouth, said, "Dunno," and then returned it to the anxious aperture.