r chairs, mouldy Turkey carpets with wretched druggets to guard
them, little cracked sticking-plaster miniatures of people in tours and
pigtails over high-shouldered mantelpieces, two dismal urns on each side
of a lanky sideboard, and in the midst a queer twisted receptacle
for worn-out knives with green handles. Under the sideboard stands a
cellaret that looks as if it held half a bottle of currant wine, and
a shivering plate-warmer that never could get any comfort out of the
wretched old cramped grate yonder. Don't you know in such houses the
grey gloom that hangs over the stairs, the dull-coloured old carpet that
winds its way up the same, growing thinner, duller, and more threadbare
as it mounts to the bedroom floors? There is something awful in the
bedroom of a respectable old couple of sixty-five. Think of the old
feathers, turbans, bugles, petticoats, pomatum-pots, spencers, white
satin shoes, false fronts, the old flaccid boneless stays tied up in
faded riband, the dusky fans, the old forty-years-old baby linen, the
letters of Sir George when he was young, the doll of poor Maria who died
in 1803, Frederick's first corduroy breeches, and the newspaper which
contains the account of his distinguishing himself at the siege of
Seringapatam. All these lie somewhere, damp and squeezed down into glum
old presses and wardrobes. At that glass the wife has sat many times
these fifty years; in that old morocco bed her children were born. Where
are they now? Fred the brave captain, and Charles the saucy colleger:
there hangs a drawing of him done by Mr. Beechey, and that sketch by
Cosway was the very likeness of Louisa before--

"Mr. Fitz-Boodle! for Heaven's sake come down. What are you doing in a
lady's bedroom?"

"The fact is, madam, I had no business there in life; but, having had
quite enough wine with Sir George, my thoughts had wandered upstairs
into the sanctuary of female excellence, where your Ladyship nightly
reposes. You do not sleep so well now as in old days, though there is no
patter of little steps to wake you overhead."

They call that room the nursery still, and the little wicket still hangs
at the upper stairs: it has been there for forty years--bon Dieu! Can't
you see the ghosts of little faces peering over it? I wonder whether
they get up in the night as the moonlight shines into the blank vacant
old room, and play there solemnly with little ghostly horses, and the
spirits of dolls, and tops that turn