All the preliminary arrangements preparatory to a visit to the East having been made, Mrs. Butterfield and Benjamin started for Chicago, where they were to take a sleeping-car for Boston. Mr. Butterfield remained at home to meet a sudden demand for his "In Excelsis Bug Exterminator," caused by the arrival of a band of French Canadians, who proposed settling on the farm-lands in the immediate vicinity of Saug Centre.

Arrangements had been made with an aunt of Mrs. Butterfield, a certain Mrs. De Sorosis, by which that lady was to entertain these Western friends during their stay in Boston.

I will not detain you with an account of the uninteresting journey from Saug Centre to Boston, except to tell you that Mrs. Butterfield told me after the journey was over that she should never wear her black "alpaca" again to travel in. On their arrival in Boston they were met at the station by Mrs. De Sorosis and her niece Asphyxia, and escorted thence to the home of Mrs. De Sorosis at the South End.

Allow me just here to devote a few lines to this lady who, as the representative of a class and as the aunt and entertainer of our friends the Butterfields, deserves an introduction.

Mrs. De Sorosis was omitted when Anacreon's "Phusis" gave beauty to women, and with truly feminine ingenuity she had adopted another method outside the sphere of Nature to attract the masculine attention so dear to her sex. Instead of making the most of her gifts and making her defects as unnoticeable as possible, she subordinated the former to an exaggeration of the latter. Her husband had "struck oil" in Pennsylvania, and had then subsided into a submissive check-signer and reader of the daily papers, a mythical kind of power-behind-the-throne known as "Mrs. De Sorosis' husband."

Mrs. De Sorosis, who was the sister of Mrs. Butterfield's father, had, in her girlhood, displayed some talent in the way of religious poetry, and after leaving Pennsylvania, and having both time and money at her disposal, she renewed her communings with the Muses and published the results to her great satisfaction in that hebdomadal sheet which assists at digestion of fish-balls and brown-bread in many a Boston household every Sunday morning.

From this small beginning her fame grew and grew, and she shortly became a celebrity in intellectual circles. She gave recitations more and more frequently, and at last had them every week. At these appeared as many of the lions as could be induced to be present. The rising young men and women were invited and were sometimes allowed to read one of their own productions. At one time the great attraction was a certain scientific defender of Orthodoxy, whose quotations were apt to be as fabulous as his support of prohibition principles was stormy and inaccurate. The blue-eyed and vegetarian supporter of idealism would of times be present and gently insinuate that all these new ideas were to be found in Plato. Papers were read by the "big bugs" and discussed by the little ones, until in one winter Mrs. De Sorosis had done more to disseminate the cant terms of German metaphysics than the originators of them would have done in half a century, and today there are more twenty-five-year-old disciples of Carlyle, Hegel and Emerson, more short-haired women and long-haired men, more specimens of "Lange Haare und kurze Gedanke," as a German contemporary puts it, in Boston and vicinity than would satisfy the most ambitious autograph collector.

In this new civilization a stranger is surprised to find so many women given up to dress-reform and pre-Raphaelite poetry; it is generally supposed that in America there is so much to be done, so much boiling and bubbling to simmerdown that there is no time for these chimerical dabblings in the literature and art which denote a civilization that is well shaken down and settled. It is supposed that these elements only come to the surface when a civilization begins to rot from its own tedium, that they are the gases therefrom caught in balloons and allowed to float about in the air till they collapse of their own accord. But this is evidently untrue, or Boston must have jumped from the cradle into long trousers without stopping for bibs, pinafores and knee-breeches. The latter is the case, and Mrs. De Sorosis was Boston's wet-nurse. She it was who gleaned from St. Beuve's "Portraits de Femmes celibres" the secret of being fascinating without beauty, and determined to make herself a martyr in the cause of antiquated gas-bags and dyspeptic hierophants. And many is the versified heart-throb she is obliged to listen to in her capacity of mother to all the intellectual neophytes whose only excitement is her weekly reception, where they hang upon the lips of Asphyxia and her friends and pay less attention to the "flow of soul" than to the material formations in corsets and crinoline. And many is the moody tit-bit dedicated to this young lady who fully appreciates the satisfactory character of a husband who has "struck oil" and reviews such contributions as the following with discreet reserve:

Yes, kisses, sweet.

Are fitting gifts of love like thine,

As dreams at waking-time

Give the poor pleasure of deceit.

So dreams are dear though they deceive,

The sad thing is that we believe

They mean - more than kisses sweet.

LE CLERC.