re, that I groaned so. I told
her my dream, and we laughed at it together.

"We must give way to the girls a little," she said. "It is natural,
you know, that they should wish us to appear a little as other people
do. The fact is, our parlor is somewhat dilapidated; think how many
years we have lived in it without an article of new furniture."

"I hate new furniture," I remarked, in the bitterness of my soul. "I
hate anything new."

My wife answered me discreetly, according to approved principles of
diplomacy. I was right. She sympathized with me. At the same time, it
was not necessary, she remarked, that we should keep a hole in our
sofa-cover and armchair,--there would certainly be no harm in sending
them to the upholsterer's to be new-covered; she didn't much mind, for
her part, moving her plants to the south back room; and the bird would
do well enough in the kitchen: I had often complained of him for
singing vociferously when I was reading aloud.

So our sofa went to the upholsterer's; but the upholsterer was struck
with such horror at its clumsy, antiquated, unfashionable appearance
that he felt bound to make representations to my wife and daughters:
positively, it would be better for them to get a new one, of a
tempting pattern which he showed them, than to try to do anything with
that. With a stitch or so here and there it might do for a basement
dining-room; but, for a parlor, he gave it as his disinterested
opinion,--he must say, if the case were his own, he should get, etc.,
etc. In short, we had a new sofa and new chairs, and the plants and
the birds were banished, and some dark-green blinds were put up to
exclude the sun from the parlor, and the blessed luminary was allowed
there only at rare intervals, when my wife and daughters were out
shopping, and I acted out my uncivilized male instincts by pulling up
every shade and vivifying the apartment as in days of old.

But this was not the worst of it. The new furniture and new carpet
formed an opposition party in the room. I believe in my heart that for
every little household fairy that went out with the dear old things
there came in a tribe of discontented brownies with the new ones.
These little wretches were always twitching at the gowns of my wife
and daughters, jogging their elbows, and suggesting odious comparisons
between the smart new articles and what remained of the old ones. They
disparaged my writing-table in the corner; they disparaged the