e
have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for.
Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes
to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely
teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man's
providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and
empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why should not
our furniture be as simple as the Arab's or the Indian's? When I think
of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers
from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any
retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture. Or what
if I were to allow--would it not be a singular allowance?--that our
furniture should be more complex than the Arab's, in proportion as we
are morally and intellectually his superiors! At present our houses are
cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out
the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning's work
undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon,
what should be man's morning work in this world? I had three pieces of
limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to
be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still,
and threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a
furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers
on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd
so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, so
called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a
Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he
would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car
we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience,
and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a
modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sun-shades,
and a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us,
invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the
Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names
of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be
crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox
cart, with a free circulation,