With what
interest and sympathy must the Newport belles have watched the career
of their quondam admirers! How must the tragic fate of some of them
have saddened friendly hearts beyond the ocean they had once traversed
as deliverers! The lot of the fair danseuses of the French balls at
Newport was in most cases the ordinary one, and yet the record of their
loves and their graces leaves a gracious fragrance amid their former
haunts in the city by the sea. In the old streets and peeping from the
quaint latticed windows we can with a little imagination see their
graceful figures and fair faces, or find in the Newport drawing-rooms
their pictured likenesses on the wall or in the persons of their
descendants, often no less piquante and attractive than the dames of
1780. Miss Champlin married, and until lately her grandson was living
in the old house, the home of five successive generations; her brother,
Christopher Champlin, married the beautiful Miss Redwood; one of the
Miss Ellerys took for a husband William Channing and became the mother
of a famous son; her granddaughter was the wife of Washington Allston;
the Miss Hunters married abroad--one the comte de Cardignan, the other
Mr.
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