simpering up at mamma, who simpers back. These
persons all fresh, raw, and red--apparently skinned. Opposite, in
gilt frame, grandpa and grandma, at thirty and twenty-two, stiff,
old-fashioned, high-collared, puff-sleeved, glaring pallidly out from
a background of solid Egyptian night. Under a glass French clock dome,
large bouquet of stiff flowers done in corpsy-white wax. Pyramidal
what-not in the corner, the shelves occupied chiefly with bric-a-brac of
the period, disposed with an eye to best effect: shell, with the Lord's
Prayer carved on it; another shell--of the long-oval sort, narrow,
straight orifice, three inches long, running from end to end--portrait
of Washington carved on it; not well done; the shell had Washington's
mouth, originally--artist should have built to that. These two are
memorials of the long-ago bridal trip to New Orleans and the French
Market. Other bric-a-brac: Californian 'specimens'--quartz, with gold
wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet of ancestral hair in
it; Indian arrow-heads, of flint; pair of bead moccasins, from uncle
who crossed the Plains; three 'alum' baskets of various colors--being
skeleton-frame of wire, clothed-on with cubes of crystallized alum in
the rock-candy style--works of art which were achieved by the young
ladies; their doubles and duplicates to be found upon all what-nots
in the land; convention of desiccated bugs and butterflies pinned to a
card; painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment--drops its
under jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candy rabbit--limbs
and features merged together, not strongly defined; pewter
presidential-campaign medal; miniature card-board wood-sawyer, to be
attached to the stove-pipe and operated by the heat; small Napoleon,
done in wax; spread-open daguerreotypes of dim children, parents,
cousins, aunts, and friends, in all attitudes but customary ones; no
templed portico at back, and manufactured landscape stretching away in
the distance--that came in later, with the photograph; all these vague
figures lavishly chained and ringed--metal indicated and secured from
doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid gold bronze; all of them too much
combed, too much fixed up; and all of them uncomfortable in inflexible
Sunday-clothes of a pattern which the spectator cannot realize
could ever have been in fashion; husband and wife generally grouped
together--husband sitting, wife standing, with hand on his shoulder--and
both p