ths, what must become of them! how humiliated would the vestment
be!--It is necessary to confess that one thing alone sustains itself
beside a woman's hair. A single fabricator can strive there. This
fabricator is an insect,--the modest silkworm."

"A particular charm surrounds the works in silk," our author then goes
on to say. "It ennobles all about it. In traversing our rudest
districts, the valleys of the Ardeche, where all is rock, where the
mulberry, the chestnut, seem to dispense with earth, to live on air and
flint, where low houses of unmortared stone sadden the eyes with their
gray tint, everywhere I saw at the door, under a kind of arcade, two or
three charming girls, with brown skin, with white teeth, who smiled at
the passer-by and spun gold. The passer-by, whirled on by the coach,
said to them under his breath: 'What a pity, innocent fays, that this
gold may not be for you! Instead of disguising it with a useless color,
instead of disfiguring it by art, what would it not gain by remaining
itself and upon these beautiful spinners! How much better than any grand
dames would this royal tissue become yourselves!'"

Perhaps it was the dowry of one of these very maidens that Belinda
wears; and all this would only go to show that to every meanest thing
the past can lend a halo. When one person showed another the "entire
costume of a Nubian woman, purchased as she wore it,"--a necklace of red
beads, and two brass ear-rings simply, hanging on a nail,--how it
brought up the whole scene, the wondrous ruins, the Nile, the lotos, and
the palm-branch, the splendid sky soaring over all, the bronze-skinned
creature shining in the sun! What a past the little glass bits had at
their command, and what a more magnificent past hung yet behind them!
Who would value a diamond, the product of any laboratory, were such a
possibility, so much as that one which, by its own unknown and
inscrutable process, defying philosopher and jeweller, has imprisoned
the sunshine that moss or leaf or flower sucked in, ages since, and set
its crystals in the darkness of the earth,--a drop of dew eternalized?
What tree of swift and sudden springing, that grows like a gourd in the
night to never so stately a height, could equal in our eyes the gnarled
and may be stunted trunk that has thrown the flickering shadows of its
leaves over the dying pillows alike of father, child, and grandchild?
The ring upon the finger is crusted thick with memories, and