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Fancy Saccharissa, beckoning and smiling from the upper windows, and a crowd of soldiers brawling and bustling at the door gentlemen of the Life Guards, clad in scarlet, with blue facings, and laced with gold at the seams; gentlemen of the Horse Grenadiers, in their caps of sky-blue cloth, with the garter embroidered on the front in gold and silver; men of the Halberdiers, in their long red coats, as bluff Harry left them, with their ruff and velvet flat caps.
Saccharissa, more over-dressed than usual, and her cousin Mellasys Plickaman, somewhat unsteady with inebriation, stood before him. He was pronouncing them man and wife, why not ogre and hag? How fortunate was my escape! As my negro guide would not listen to my proposal to set the Mellasys establishment on fire while the inmates slept, I followed him to the banks of the Bayou.
How wretched that America should not be governed by hereditary sovereigns and an order of nobles trained to control! The day passed. It was afternoon, and I sat reading one of the novels of my favorite De Balzac to my Saccharissa. At the same time my imagination, following the author, strayed to Paris, and recalled to me my bachelor joys in that gay capital.
"Arthur!" shouted that atrocious Plickaman, "the loafer's name's Aminadab, after that old Jew, his grandfather." Saccharissa looked at him and smiled contemptuously. I tried to smile. I could not. Aminadab was my name. That old dotard, my grandfather, had borne it before me. I had suppressed it carefully. "Aminadab's his name," repeated the Colonel.
Belinda ate with her knife; and Saccharissa had only that weapon, or a two-pronged fork, or a spoon, for her pease. Have you ever looked at Gilray's print of the Prince of Wales, a languid voluptuary, retiring after his meal, and noted the toothpick which he uses? . . . You are right, madam; I own that the subject is revolting and terrible. I will not pursue it.
We were betrothed, Saccharissa Mellasys and I. In vain did Mellasys Plickaman glower along the corridors of the Millard. I pitied him for his defeat too much to notice his attempts to pick a quarrel. Firm in the affection of my Saccharissa and in the confidence of her father, I waived the insults of the aggrieved and truculent cousin. He had lost the heiress. I had won her.
But to the last, these chivalric, but prejudiced and misguided gentlemen declined to listen to my explanations. Mellasys Plickaman had completely perverted their judgments against me. The last object I saw was Saccharissa, looking more like a Hottentot Venus than ever, waving her handkerchief and kissing her hand to me. Did she repent her brief disloyalty?
"I suppose I shall get somewhere if I keep walking; and I can't starve, though I hate the sight of this horrid stuff," she said to herself, as she hurried over the mountains of Gibraltar Rock that divided the city of Saccharissa from the great desert of brown sugar that lay beyond.
Sachary Mellasys was, as I was well aware, the great sugar-planter of Louisiana, and Saccharissa his only child. I am an imaginative man. I have never doubted, that, if I should ever give my fancies words, they would rank with the great creations of genius. At the dulcet name of Mellasys a fairy scene grew before my eyes.
And Mellasys held up a highly colored caricature, covering one whole side of my friend's sheet. Saccharissa rose from the sofa where she had been sitting during the whole of my trial. She stood before me, really I cannot deny it, a little, ugly, vulgar figure, overloaded with finery, and her laces and ribbons trembled with rage.
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