really, or really try to be, a kind of fashionable novels. It is a
queer domain of fashion, to be sure, peopled by the strangest
aborigines, who talk and are talked about in a language most
interesting to the philologist. Here poor Lady Fanny Flummery would
have been sadly to seek, for her characters, though noble, were
moral, and her pen was wielded on the side of Church and State. But
these western fashionables have morals and a lingo of their own,
made in equal parts of the American idioms and of expressions
transferred from the jargon of Decadence and the Parnassiculet
Contemporain. As one peruses these novels one thinks of a new tale
to be told--The Last of the Fashionables, who died away, like the
buffalo and the grisly bear, in some canon or forest of the Wild
West. I think this distinguished being, Ultimus hominum
venustiorum, will find the last remnants of the Gentlemanly Party in
some Indian tribe, Apaches or Sioux. I see him raised to the rank
of chief, and leading the red-skinned and painted cavaliers on the
war-path against the Vulgarians of the ultimate Democracy. To
depict this dandy chief would require the art at once of a Cooper
and a Ouida. Let me attempt -


THE LAST FIGHT OF FOUR HAIR-BRUSHES


By this time the Sioux were flying in all directions, mowed down by
the fire of Gatling and Maxim guns. The scrub of Little Big Horn
Creek was strewn with the bodies of writhing braves. On the livid
and volcanic heights of Mount Buncombe, the painted tents were
blazing merrily. But on a mound above the creek, an ancient
fortress of some long-forgotten people, a small group of Indian