my astonishment I
found they had been living there some thirty years, since the death of
their parents, in an isolation and remoteness impossible to describe, in
an Arab house, with native servants, "the world forgetting, by the world
forgot." Yet these ladies had names well known in New York fifty years
ago.

The glimpse I had of their existence made me thoughtful as I rode home in
the twilight, across a suburb none too safe for strangers. What had the
future in store for those two? Or, worse still, for the survivor of
those two? In contrast, I saw a certain humble "home" far away in
America, where two old ladies were ending their lives surrounded by
loving friends and relations, honored and cherished and guarded tenderly
from the rude world.

In big cities like Paris and Rome there is another class of the
expatriated, the wealthy who have left their homes in a moment of pique
after the failure of some social or political ambition; and who find in
these centres the recognition refused them at home and for which their
souls thirsted.

It is not to these I refer, although it is curious to see a group of
people living for years in a country of which they, half the time, do not
speak the language (beyond the necessities of housekeeping and shopping),
knowing but few of its inhabitants, and seeing none of the society of the
place, their acquaintance rarely going beyond that equivocal, hybrid
class that surrounds rich "strangers" and hangs on to the outer edge of
the _grand monde_. One feels for this latter class merely contempt, but
one's pity is reserved for the former. What object lessons some lives on
the Continent would be to impatient souls at home, who feel discontented
with their surroundings, and anxious to break away and wander abroad! Let
them think twice before they cut the thousand ties it has taken a
lifetime to form. Better monotony at your own fireside, my friends,
where at the worst, you are known and have your place, no matter how
small, than an old age among strangers.

No. 12--"Seven Ages" of Furniture

The progress through life of active-minded Americans is apt to be a
series of transformations. At each succeeding phase of mental
development, an old skin drops from their growing intelligence, and they
assimilate the ideas and tastes of their new condition, with a facility
and completeness unknown to other nations.

One series of metamorphoses particularly amusing to watch is, that