could interpret the sublimest ideas of Mendelssohn. They knew sufficiently of lines and colors to dress themselves charmingly at small cost, and their little feet were well enough educated to bear them over the polished floor of a ball-room as lightly as swallows' wings. The flirting of their intelligent fans, the flashing of those quick smiles where eyes, teeth, and lips all did their dazzling duty, and the satin twinkling of those neat boots in the waltz, are harder to forget than things better worth remembering.
Since the beginning of the Revolutionary régime there have been serious schisms and heart-burnings in the gay world. The peolhe of the old situation assumed that the people of the new were rebels and traitors, and stopped breaking bread with them. But in spite of this the palace and the ministry of war were gay enough,—for Madrid is a city of office-holders, and the White House is always easy to fill, even if two thirds of the Senate is uncongenial. The principal fortress of the post was the palace of the spirituelle and hospitable lady whose society name is Duchess of Peñaranda, but who is better known as the mother of the Empress of the French. Her salon was the weekly rendezvous of the irreconcilable adherents of the House of Bourbon, and the aristocratic beauty that gathered there was too powerful a seduction even for the young and hopeful partisans of the powers that be. There was
