GALE MIDDLETON.

CHAPTER I.

Why should they not continue to value themselves for this outside fashionableness of the taylor's or tirewoman's making, when their parents have so early instructed them to do so?

LOCKE.

IT was about four o'clock in the afternoon when the chariot of Lady Barbara Rusport swept rapidly, and yet almost noiselessly, along the macadamised pavement of Portland Place, and drew up at a handsome house towards its northern extremity. The footman plied the knocker with an air and vigour that seemed to express a mingled sense of his own importance and that of his titled mistress; but, even in the best regulated mansions of the rich and noble, the delay in getting the street-door opened ge

nerally increases with the number of the domestics, who must all be collected and distributed in their respective places before admission can be given to a visitant. Though there were but three men-servants in the house of Sir Matthew Middleton, in Portland Place, they were by no means well drilled; nor, had they been three times as numerous, could the menial duties of the establishment have been worse discharged. Monsieur Dupin, the French butler, whom Lady Middleton, half in joke and half in hope that the title might be seriously recognised by her friends, termed her maître d'hôtel, had the faculty of being generally in the way when he was not wanted, and as often out of the way when his presence was required. As he was in the latter predicament at the moment in question, his fellow-servants were still running about the premises seeking him and calling out his name, when the knocker again sent its echoes through Portland Place, and Lady Barbara, peering through her eye-glass, first at the door and then at the drawing-room windows, murmured in a peevish, drawling voice,

"It is well that I never hurry myself about any thing. She must be at home, for I wrote her word that I should call, and she would hardly presume to disappoint me. It is well also that I have a companion who can beguile the time quite as well as Lady Middleton." So saying she leaned back in the carriage, and began playing with an Italian greyhound seated by her side, in which occupation she had remained two or three minutes, when Dupin, having been found, took his station on the landing-place; one of the livery servants stood at the foot of the stairs, the second opened the door, and the visitant was at length ushered into a spacious and handsome drawing-room, from the extremity of which the mistress of the mansion came running up to her, exclaiming:

“Ah, ma chere Lady Barbara! charmée de vous voir. I am delighted to see you! this is so very good of you; and I am the more vexed that my stupid people should keep you so long at the door. Pray accept my apologies."

"There is not the smallest occasion for

offering them; and since have requested,

you

nay intreated, that I would apprise you whenever you deviated from any of the customary usages of high life and the select circles, I must remind you that to make a formal apology, especially to a friend, is almost as much out of vogue, as to present compliments in writing a note to introduce your visitants to one another, or to say grace before and after dinner. Trifling as they may seem, it is only by such minutiae that, in these levelling times, any distinctions can be preserved. Permit me also to guard you against interlarding your ordinary discourse with scraps of French, even if they be grammatical and idiomatic, as yours always

are."

I

"You surprise me, Lady Barbara. thought I could not be wrong in adopting what seems to be an invariable custom of high life, if I may believe the authority of certain fashionable novels."

"Ah, my credulous friend! is it possible that you can have been duped by those vulgar