as gravestones. Then came an old cottage fixed up nobby, then
a comfortable old wooden mansion, then a splendid dwelling in the style
of the fifteenth century, and after that the palace of a railway
grandee. Here and there on a corner stood a Gothic church. All day
well-dressed people trod our pavements and beautiful carriages rolled
by our windows. Our cottage was my ideal of perfection: it had few
rooms, but those spacious. We had no sitting-room. Let me see: what
does that word suggest to my mind? A table heaped with stale
newspapers, a stand piled with sewing, a darned carpet, scratched
furniture and fly-specked wall-paper.

Lydia's presents filled our house. All were Eastlake and in good taste,
the colors sage-green, pumpkin-yellow and ginger-brown, dashed with
splashes of peacock feathers and Japanese fans. The vases were
straddle-legged and pot-bellied Asiatic shapes. Dragons in bronze and
ivory, sticky-looking faience and glittering majolica, stood in the
corners. Silk embroideries representing the stork--a scrawny bird with
a scalp-lock at the back of its neck, looking like a mosquito when
flying--and porcelain landscapes out of drawing, like a child's first
attempts, peopled by individuals with the expression of having their
hair pulled, hung 'twixt our dados and friezes. Lydia's young-lady
friends gave her their works in oil or water-colors done in a fine,
free-hand style that may one day form a school of its own. Our Chicago
girls are people of _nous_. Their talk is "fluent as the flight of a
swallow:" their manners are delightful--American manners must be
excellent, so many Englishmen marry American girls. Their playing makes
us glad the seven poor strings of the old musicians have been
multiplied to seven times seven: no Chicago girl is a musician unless
she has the masters at her finger-tips. And they are readers too. You
would suppose, judging from the papers, that our Chicagoans are
inordinately fond of reading about the indiscretions of rustic wives,
and are given to a perusal of the news in startling headlines: but such
is not the fact. We are great readers of the distinguished magazines
and of first-rate books, and our taste for art is keen. When we go
abroad we don't care so much for mountains and rivers--they are like
potatoes and pork to a man who is visiting: we have them at home--but
we _are_ after art. Ruskin says no people can be great in art unless it
lives among beautiful natural objects; w