The only other individual I
remember at the dinner was that most beautiful person, Lady Harriet
d'Orsay. Years after, when the Halifax projector had become Sir Samuel
Cunard, a man of fame in the worlds of commerce and business of New York
and London, a baronet of large fortune, and a sort of proprietor of the
Atlantic Ocean between England and the United States, he reminded me of
this charming dinner in which Mrs. Norton had so successfully found the
means of forwarding his interests, and spoke with enthusiasm of her
kind-heartedness as well as her beauty and talents; he, of course, passed
under the Caudine Forks, beneath which all men encountering her had to
bow and throw down their arms. She was very fond of inventing devices for
seals, and other such ingenious exercises of her brains, and she gave
---- a star with the motto, "Procul sed non extincta," which she civilly
said bore reference to me in my transatlantic home. She also told me,
when we were talking of mottoes for seals and rings, that she had had
engraved on a ring she always wore the name of that miserable bayou of
the Mississippi--Atchafalaya--where Gabriel passes near one side of an
island, while Evangeline, in her woe-begone search, is lying asleep on
the other; and that, to her surprise, she found that the King of the
Belgians wore a ring on which he had had the same word engraved, as an
expression of the bitterest and most hopeless disappointment.
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