l gifts, the _gages d'amour_, not
often disinterested, as bright and beautiful as when they left the
hands of the jeweller; but the givers and the receivers where are they?
Mouldered in the grave long, long years ago! Through how many hands may
these objects not have passed since Death snatched away the persons for
whom they were originally designed! And here they are in the ignoble
custody of some avaricious vender, who having obtained them at the sale
of some departed amateur for less than half their first cost, now
expects to extort more than double.

He takes them up in his unwashed fingers, turns them--oh,
profanation!--round and round, in order to display their various
merits, descants on the delicacy of the workmanship, the sharpness of
the chiseling, the pure water of the brilliants, and the fine taste
displayed in the form; tells a hundred lies about the sum he gave for
them, the offers he has refused, the persons to whom they once
belonged, and those who wish to purchase them!

The _flacon_ of some defunct prude is placed side by side with the
_vinaigrette_ of some _jolie danseuse_ who was any thing but prudish.
How shocked would the original owner of the _flacon_ feel at the
friction! The fan of some _grande dame de la cour_ touches the
diamond-mounted _etui_ of the wife of some _financier_, who would have
given half her diamonds to enter the circle in which she who once owned
this fan found more _ennui_ than amusement. The cane of a deceased
philosopher is in close contact with the golden-hilted sword of a
_petit maitre de l'ancien regime_, and the sparkling _tabatiere_ of a
_Marquis Musque_, the partaker if not the cause of half his _succes
dans le monde_, is placed by the _chapelet_ of a _religieuse de haute
naissance_, who often perhaps dropped a tear on the beads as she
counted them in saying her Ave Marias, when some unbidden thought of
the world she had resigned usurped the place of her aspirations for a
brighter and more enduring world.

"And so 't will be when I am gone," as Moore's beautiful song says; the
rare and beautiful _bijouterie_ which I have collected with such pains,
and looked on with such pleasure, will probably be scattered abroad,
and find their resting places not in gilded _salons_, but in the dingy
coffers of the wily _brocanteur_, whose exorbitant demands will
preclude their finding purchasers. Even these inanimate and puerile
objects have their moral, if people would but seek it