A Hundred Years Ago
THE "SPECTATOR," AUGUST 28TH, 1830.
A NEW YORK FASHIONABLE.
Her taste and imagination, and that love of the recherelai, that is, perhaps, a subtle form of vanity, had lcd her to avoid whatever was commonplace. Even the names of her children indicated her artificial taste. She relieved the simplicity of Emily, a name adopted in compliment to her grandmother, by giving it a French termination ; and subsequently gratified her fancy by selecting for her younger children the rare names of Gabrielle, Victorino, Julian. and Eugene. In the arrangement of her house, she avoided the usual modes of vulgar wealth. She tolerated no seivilo imitatior of French ornament; no vases of flaunting artificial flowers, in full eternal bloom ; no pier tables covered with French china kept forshow, not ` wisely ' and looking much like a porcelain dealer's specimens, or a little girl's baby-house ; no gaudy time-piece confounding all mythology, or like the Homan Pantheon, embracing all ; in short, there was nothing commonplace, nothing that indicated the unin- spired, undirected art of the fabricator. The very curtains and carpets betrayed, in their web, the fair mistress of the mansion. There were few ornaments in the apartments, but they were of the most exquisite and costly kinds. Lamps of the purest classic fern, - the prettiest allurnefic-cases (match-eases) and firo.screens that ever came from the hand of a gifted Parisienne—flowers compound.] of shells, and wrought into card-racks, that might have served the pretty Naiads themselves, (if, perchance, visiting-cards are the tokens of submarine courtesies,) and a Cupid of Italian sculpture, bearing on his wing a timepiece, and looking askance, with a mis- chievous smile, at this emblem of the sternest of tyrants. Connected with the drawing-room there was a library, filled with the flowers of foreign literature, and the popular product ices of the day, and embellished with a veiled copy of Vanderlyn's Ariadno, and a beauti- ful portrait of H. Layton (herself) in the character of Ainmida.
A SAGACIOUS INFANT.
Some few days since two of the children of Mr. Gabriel Horton, of this town, one aged about three years and the other eighteen months, were playing some rods from the house, near a well which was full to the brim, unprotected by a curb, when the youngest accidentally fell in. Mrs. H., being some distance off, luckily heard the children anxiously calling for her, and immediately repaired in direction of the noise, where she found the youngest in the well, and the other holding it up by the arms ! it was immediately rescued quite exhausted. We mention the circumstance as a remark- able evidence of presence of mind in so young a child. In ninety-nine eases out of a hundred, under similar circumstances, instead of offering assistance on the spot, a child so young would have ran to its parents for relief, not afforded it itself.
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