VALENTINE'S MANUAL

containing nine dresses and nine bonnets ? She stops nine
days, just long enough to wear a new dress and a new
bonnet every day. Then she moves to Sar-atoga—nine
more dresses and nine more Iwnnets. Then she flies to
Niagara—the nine again. And then she comes l)ack to
New York for more dresses and more bonnets. By the
way, they call a lady's dress here a "robe" and a bonnet
a "hat." It is more Parisian; it sounds dearer. Finally,
what do you think of a lady who gives a ball and appears
with a coronal of diamonds lit up with jets of gas! Upon
my word, fellow countrymen, this thing was done the
other night in New York City. Where was the reservoir ?
In her hoop skirt, I presume, and an elastic pipe must
have passed through one of her "niagaras" or "cataract
curls"—the name given to the shower of true or false
ringlets the ladies are in the habit of wearing at the back
of their heads. Under Providence the gas-lit lady didn't
Ijlow up; and after astonishing the company for a few
minutes with her incandescent head-dress, she suffered
herself to be turned off.

When a proud English Duchess powdered her hair with
gold it was deemed that the apogee of extravagance in
dress had been reached, but the diadem of carbureted
hydrogen, a wreath of blazes ! of "whiskey in the hair,"
as a complaint suffered in the morning by gentlemen who
have taken too much Bourbon overnight, I have certainly
heard, but never until now of gas in the hair.

The Old Brevoort

At last the man landed me on the steep white marble
steps of the Brevoort House, a handsome mansion, but
not overhuge, at the corner of Eighth Street, or Clinton

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