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Catalina was received with a welcome kindness
by Mrs. Aubineau, the lady with whom she had been
invited to spend the winter, and who appeared struck
with the improvement of her person since she left
boarding-school two or three years before. Our
heroine was glad to see Mrs. Aubineau again, having
a vivid recollection of her pleasing manners and matronly
kindness.

The husband of this lady was a son of one of
the Huguenots driven by the bigotry or policy of
Louis the Fourteenth to this land of liberty—liberty
of action, liberty of speech, and liberty of conscience.
These emigrants constituted a portion of the best
educated, most enlightened, polite, and wealthy of
the early inhabitants of New-York. They laid the
foundation of families which still exist in good reputation,
and from some of them have descended men
who are for ever associated with the history of our
country. The father of Mr. Aubineau had occupied a
dignified situation under the Dutch government while
it held possession of New-York; but lost it when the
province was assigned to the Duke of York, whose
hungry retainers were portioned off in the new world,
there not being loaves and fishes enough in the old
to satisfy them all. Both father and son cherished

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some little resentment on this occasion; and when a
legislative body was established, one or other being
generally a member, they never failed to be found
voting and acting with the popular side, in opposition
to the governor. They joined the old Dutch
party in all their measures, which were generally
favourable to the rights of the colony, and attained
to great consideration and respect among them.

Notwithstanding his politics, Mr. Aubineau the
younger married a handsome English woman; not
a descendant merely of English parents, but a real
native, born and educated in London. Her father
came over with an appointment, being a younger
brother, with a younger brother's portion, which
generally consists in the family influence employed
on all occasions in quartering the young branches
upon the public. The great use of colonies is to
provide for younger brothers. What this appointment
was I do not recollect; but whatever it was
it enabled Mr. Majoribanks to live in style, and
carry his head high above the unlucky beings who
furnished the means, and whose destiny it had been
to be born on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean,
where it is well known every thing, from men down
to dandies, degenerates. To be born at home, as
the phrase then was, operated as a sort of patent of
nobility, and desperate was the ambition of the rich
young citizens, and still more desperate that of the
city heiresses and their mothers, to unite their fate
and fortunes with a real genuine exotic. Many a
soldier of fortune, “who spent half-a-crown out of
sixpence a-day,” was thus provided for; and not a
few female adventurers gained excellent establishments,
over which they were noted for exercising
absolute dominion. For a provincial husband to

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contradict a wife from the mother country was held
equivalent to the enormity of a provincial legislature
refusing its assent to a rescript of his majesty's
puissant governor. It smacked of flat rebellion.

Mr. Aubineau was, however, tolerably fortunate
in his choice. His wife always contradicted him
aside when in public, and issued her commands in
a whisper. She never got angry with him, and only
laughed and took her own way whenever he found
fault; or, what was still more discreet, took no notice
of his ill-humour, and did just as she pleased.
She was fond of gayety, dress, and equipage, and
particularly fond of flirting with the officers attached
to the governor's family and establishment. These
gentlemen, having nothing to do, and no inclination
to marry, except they were well paid for it, naturally
selected the married ladies as objects for their
devoirs; very properly concluding, that whatever
might be the case with the ladies, there could be
no breach of promise of marriage on their part, and,
consequently, no dishonour in being as particular as
the lady pleased. As to the provincial husbands,
they were out of the question.

Among the most prominent of the foibles of Mrs. Aubineau
was an idea at that time very prevalent among
both English and American women. This was an
undisguised and confirmed conviction, that the whole
universe was a nest of barbarians, compared with
old England, and that there was as much moral and
physical difference between being born there and
here, as there was space between the two countries.
Though not much of the blue-stocking, that sisterhood
not having made its appearance as a distinct
class in those days, like all good English folks, she
could ring the changes on Shakspeare and Milton,

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and Bacon and Locke; those four great names on
which English poetry, philosophy, and metaphysics
seem entirely to depend for their renown; and
which form a standard to which every blockhead
more or less assimilates his mind, as if the reflected
rays of their glory had illuminated in some degree
the midnight darkness of his own intellect. This
truly John Bull notion she considered so settled and
established beyond all reasonable question, that she
always spoke of it with an amusing simplicity, arising
from a perfect confidence in an undisputed point,
upon which all mankind, except her husband, agreed
with as much unanimity as that the sun shone in a
clear day. In regard to the solitary exception aforesaid,
Mrs. Aubineau settled that in her mind, by
referring it to that undefinable matrimonial sympathy
which impels so many men to agree with every
other woman when she is wrong, and oppose their
wives whenever they are right. The connexion between
this lady and our heroine originated in a
marriage between the elder Aubineau and a sister
Colonel Vancour. Into the hands of Mrs. Aubineau
the colonel consigned his daughter for the winter,
at the same time communicating her engagement
with Sybrandt Westbrook, at which she laughed not
a little in her sleeve. She had already a plan in
her head for establishing her rich and beautiful
guest in a far more splendid sphere, as she was
pleased to imagine. At the end of eight or ten days
Colonel Vancour took his departure for home in the
good sloop Watervliet, which had made vast despatch
in unlading and lading, on account of the
lateness of the season.

Catalina was connected in different ways with
almost all the really respectable and wealthy

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inhabitants of New-York and its vicinity; such as, the
Philipses, the Stuyvesants, the Van Courtlandts, the
Beekmans, Bayards, Delanceys, Gouverneurs, Van
Hornes, Rapalyes, Rutgers, Waltons, and a score of
others too tedious to enumerate. Of course she could
be in no want of visiters or invitations, and there
was every prospect of a gay winter. But all these
good folks were only secondary in the estimation
of Mrs. Aubineau, when compared with—not his
majesty's governor and his family, for they were
out of the sphere of mortal comparison—but with
the families of his majesty's chief justice, his majesty's
attorney and solicitor-generals, his majesty's
collector of the customs, and, indeed, with the families
of any of his majesty's petty officers, however
insignificant. These formed the focus of high life
in the ancient city of New-York, and nothing upon
the face of the earth was more ridiculous in the
eyes of a discreet observer than the pretensions of
this little knot of dependants over the truly dignified
independence of the great body of the wealthy
inhabitants, except, perhaps, the docility with which
these latter submitted to the petty usurpation.

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