f color and tracery.
There, is no restraint in price,--four or six dollars a yard, it is all
the same to them,--and soon a magic flower-garden blooms on the floors,
at a cost of five hundred dollars. A pair of elegant rugs, at fifty
dollars apiece, complete the inventory, and bring our rooms to the mark
of eight hundred dollars for papering and carpeting alone. Now come the
great mantel-mirrors for four hundred more, and our rooms progress. Then
comes the upholsterer, and measures our four windows, that he may
skilfully barricade them from air and sunshine. The fortifications
against heaven, thus prepared, cost, in the shape of damask, cord,
tassels, shades, laces, and cornices, about two hundred dollars per
window. To be sure, they make the rooms close and sombre as the grave;
but they are of the most splendid stuffs; and if the sun would only
reflect, he would see, himself, how foolish it was for him to try to
force himself into a window guarded by his betters. If there is anything
cheap and plebeian, it is sunshine and fresh air! Behold us, then, with
our two rooms papered, carpeted, and curtained for two thousand dollars;
and now are to be put in them sofas, lounges, etageres, centre-tables,
screens, chairs of every pattern and device, for which it is but
moderate to allow a thousand more. We have now two parlors furnished at
an outlay of three thousand dollars, without a single picture, a single
article of statuary, a single object of Art of any kind, and without any
light to see them by, if they were there. We must say for our Boston
upholsterers and furniture-makers that such good taste generally reigns
in their establishments that rooms furnished at hap-hazard from them
cannot fail of a certain air of good taste, so far as the individual
things are concerned. But the different articles we have supposed,
having been ordered without reference to one another or the rooms, have,
when brought together, no unity of effect, and the general result is
scattering and confused. If asked how Philip's parlors look, your reply
is,--"Oh, the usual way of such parlors,--everything that such people
usually get,--medallion-carpets, carved furniture, great mirrors, bronze
mantel-ornaments, and so on." The only impression a stranger receives,
while waiting in the dim twilight of these rooms, is that their owner
is rich, and able to get good, handsome things, such as all other rich
people get.

Now our friend John, as often happens