tated, the offending waiter was out of hearing on the other side of the hall.
Mrs. Skates now began to hope that her sufferings for this once were at an end, but scarcely was the baby quieted, when James caught hold of the chain that depended from his mother’s neck, and inquired with the most provoking innocence, “Whose is this, ma? ’Taint yours, is it? Cousin ’Phrony lent it to you; didn’t she, ma?”
“Sh-h-h, James!” fretted Mrs. Skates. I think at that moment she would have enjoyed the “trouncing business” right heartily! It was too vexatious that he should expose what one felt the keenest anxiety to conceal—the fact that she was really glittering in “borrowed plumage!”
“Shall you whip me, ma?” pursued the little wretch, taking alarm from his mother’s severe expression, and cowering down in the chair behind his father, where he had been standing; while that uncomfortable and embarrassed worthy was trying to clear his plate of its contents, and at the same time working industriously to keep the perspiration from streaming in rivulets over his face. James managed to entertain himself in his new situation with his own perpetual chatter, and with scratching the chair with his fork, till the meal was finished. Oh, how glad were Mr. and Mrs. Skates when that event happened! Poor Katy felt that her little No. 150 would be an asylum, indeed, she was so thoroughly disconcerted; and Mr. Skates felt that he should never desire to dine again as long as he lived! Visions of his own quiet and social table at the forsaken home danced through his mind with a kind of tantalizing mockery; and then the precious absence of ceremony there! Sick, indeed, he was of so much ceremony, that “he didn’t know nothing what they meant by!” He would have relished Katy’s very poorest “washing-day hash,” done up in “pot-skimmings,” a thousand times better than those elaborately served viands, and their multitude of French gastronomic accompaniments, and “feel so all shook-up in his mind,” as he declared he had done at this first city dinner.
