and the lassies go making love fifty years ago just as they do now? Are
men and women so unchanged? Did little maidens' hearts beat the same
under pearl-embroidered bodices as they do under Mother Hubbard cloaks?
Have steel casques and chimney-pot hats made no difference to the brains
that work beneath them? Oh, Time! great Chronos! and is this your power?
Have you dried up seas and leveled mountains and left the tiny human
heart-strings to defy you? Ah, yes! they were spun by a Mightier than
thou, and they stretch beyond your narrow ken, for their ends are made
fast in eternity. Ay, you may mow down the leaves and the blossoms, but
the roots of life lie too deep for your sickle to sever. You refashion
Nature's garments, but you cannot vary by a jot the throbbings of her
pulse. The world rolls round obedient to your laws, but the heart of man
is not of your kingdom, for in its birthplace "a thousand years are but
as yesterday."

I am getting away, though, I fear, from my "furnished apartments," and
I hardly know how to get back. But I have some excuse for my meanderings
this time. It is a piece of old furniture that has led me astray, and
fancies gather, somehow, round old furniture, like moss around old
stones. One's chairs and tables get to be almost part of one's life and
to seem like quiet friends. What strange tales the wooden-headed old
fellows could tell did they but choose to speak! At what unsuspected
comedies and tragedies have they not assisted! What bitter tears have
been sobbed into that old sofa cushion! What passionate whisperings the
settee must have overheard!

New furniture has no charms for me compared with old. It is the old
things that we love--the old faces, the old books, the old jokes. New
furniture can make a palace, but it takes old furniture to make a home.
Not merely old in itself--lodging-house furniture generally is that--but
it must be old to us, old in associations and recollections. The
furniture of furnished apartments, however ancient it may be in reality,
is new to our eyes, and we feel as though we could never get on with it.
As, too, in the case of all fresh acquaintances, whether wooden or human
(and there is very little difference between the two species sometimes),
everything impresses you with its worst aspect. The knobby wood-work and
shiny horse-hair covering of the easy-chair suggest anything but ease.
The mirror is smoky. The curtains want washing. The carpet is frayed.
The