'This young lady was hight Liner, Catherine Julia Liner. She wept for love of Shuffleshank, her inconstant beau.
'For one whole season Shuffleshank, whose soul, if he had any, was in his toes, hovered about Miss Liner, and attended her every where. He waltzed with her night after night, (and Shuffleshank twirled divinely,) and in the pauses of the dance he wiped the perspiration from his face, and with his touching and tender eyes,
'Gazed on the fair,
Who caused his care,
And wiped and looked, wiped and looked,
Wiped and looked, and wiped again,'
until her parents and herself were quite certain of an offer. He certainly owed her one. She deserved some compensation for listening to his interminable stories, which were as monotonous as long. So celebrated a narrator was he, that his friends, when endeavoring to give each other an idea of some distance traversed, would say, 'It was one of Shuffleshank's stories,' or two stories. Sometimes unfortunate men could tell of a six-story walk, and these were looked upon as persons of great strength and vast powers of endurance. But the heartless, ungrateful Shuffleshank allowed the mercury to descend in the thermometer of his affections for Miss Liner, and gradually his attentions grew colder and colder, until they sunk below zero and became neglect. But the faithless one did not long survive his treachery. He broke his wind in attempting to finish his tenth story that day, and expired soon after suddenly. He was discovered lying on his back, his toes turned out, and his head resting on a volume of Cotillons à quatre mains. His executors found among his papers the first sheet of a pamphlet on his favorite science, waltzing, dated only a few days before his decease.
You will pardon us, friend Knickerbocker, for giving your readers one or two original rules of so great a professor:
'Rule I. The cavalier should endeavor to waltz with women of a suitable size. The relative test is, that the noses of the couple be on a level.
'Rule II. He should put his right arm as far round the lady's waist as possible, and draw her toward him with the other hand, so that the noses before mentioned shall be not more than half an inch apart.
'Rule III. In case the lady should be inclined to jump, he must hold her down to the floor by pressing firmly upon her tournure.'
Society has indeed suffered a sad loss by his untimely death. But before we go any farther with our story, we will give a crow-quill croquis of the career of Miss Catherine Liner, down to the period of Shuffleshank's catastrophe.
'Miss Liner was of a good family: her pa, a retired merchant, with some tincture of the humanities, and she herself well educated; that is, she knew enough Italian to say pesch'e; enough German for 'es ist warm;' and enough French for 'Oh, vee.' Music she loved to distraction. True, she sometimes nodded at a concert, but then it was only to beat the time, and when awakened by a crash, she would shake her head in languid ecstasy, and sigh out a sentimental 'ah!' Or, if the nature of the air required it, she could shout in a voice sonorous as a cricket's: 'Divine!' 'magnifique!' 'grandioso!' or the hardest word she might remember out of any language. The gentlemen in waiting caught the cue; and men who had not ear enough to keep time when dancing, were unintelligibly scientific in allegros and andantes, and made frequent and familiar allusions to Hummel, Meyerbeer, Beethoven, and Weber. We ourselves must plead guilty of claiming an acquaintance where we never had an introduction. How true is that saying of Fuller: 'The best of God's children have a smack of hypocrisy!'