sented a confused picture in which every
achievement, human and divine, was mingled. Crocodiles, monkeys, and
serpents stuffed with straw grinned at glass from church windows,
seemed to wish to bite sculptured heads, to chase lacquered work, or to
scramble up chandeliers. A Sevres vase, bearing Napoleon's portrait
by Mme. Jacotot, stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The
beginnings of the world and the events of yesterday were mingled
with grotesque cheerfulness. A kitchen jack leaned against a pyx, a
republican sabre on a mediaeval hackbut. Mme. du Barry, with a star
above her head, naked, and surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look
longingly out of Latour's pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried
to guess the purpose of the spiral curves that wound towards her.
Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons
had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life;
porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from china, old
salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging to feudal times. A carved ivory
ship sped full sail on the back of a motionless tortoise.

The Emperor Augustus remained unmoved and imperial with an air-pump
thrust into one eye. Portraits of French sheriffs and Dutch
burgomasters, phlegmatic now as when in life, looked down pallid and
unconcerned on the chaos of past ages below them.

Every land of earth seemed to have contributed some stray fragment of
its learning, some example of its art. Nothing seemed lacking to this
philosophical kitchen-midden, from a redskin's calumet, a green and
golden slipper from the seraglio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol, to
the soldier's tobacco pouch, to the priest's ciborium, and the plumes
that once adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was rendered
yet more bizarre by the accidents of lighting, by a multitude of
confused reflections of various hues, by the sharp contrast of blacks
and whites. Broken cries seemed to reach the ear, unfinished dramas
seized upon the imagination, smothered lights caught the eye. A thin
coating of inevitable dust covered all the multitudinous corners and
convolutions of these objects of various shapes which gave highly
picturesque effects.

First of all, the stranger compared the three galleries which
civilization, cults, divinities, masterpieces, dominions, carousals,
sanity, and madness had filled to repletion, to a mirror with numerous
facets, each depicting a world. After