Allez."-- Billionism, or even millionism, must be a blessed kind of state, with health and clear conscience and youth and good looks,--but most blessed is this, that it takes off all the mean cares which give people the three wrinkles between the eyebrows, and leaves them free to have a good time and make others have a good time, all the way along from the charity that tips up unexpected loads of wood before widows' houses, and leaves foundling turkeys upon poor men's door-steps, and sets lean clergymen crying at the sight of anonymous fifty-dollar bills, to the taste which orders a perfect banquet in such sweet accord with every sense that everybody's nature flowers out full--blown in its golden--glowing, fragrant atmosphere.
-- A great party given by the smaller gentry of the interior is a kind of solemnity, so to speak.

It involves so much labor and anxiety,--its spasmodic splendors are so violently contrasted with the homeliness of every-day family-life,--it is such a formidable matter to break in the raw subordinates to the manege of the cloak-room and the table,--there is such a terrible uncertainty in the results of unfamiliar culinary operations,--so many feuds are involved in drawing that fatal line which divides the invited from the uninvited fraction of the local universe,--that, if the notes requested the pleasure of the guests' company on "this solemn occasion," they would pretty nearly express the true state of things.
The Colonel himself had been pressed into the service.

He had pounded something in the great mortar.

He had agitated a quantity of sweetened and thickened milk in what was called a cream-freezer.

At eleven o'clock, A.M., he retired for a space.