of an
observant, receptive daughter of Uncle Sam who, aided and followed (at a
distance) by an adoring husband, gradually develops her excellent brain,
and rises through fathoms of self-culture and purblind experiment, to the
surface of dilettantism and connoisseurship. One can generally detect
the exact stage of evolution such a lady has reached by the bent of her
conversation, the books she is reading, and, last but not least, by her
material surroundings; no outward and visible signs reflecting inward and
spiritual grace so clearly as the objects people collect around them for
the adornment of their rooms, or the way in which those rooms are
decorated.

A few years ago, when a young man and his bride set up housekeeping on
their own account, the "old people" of both families seized the
opportunity to unload on the beginners (under the pretence of helping
them along) a quantity of furniture and belongings that had (as the
shopkeepers say) "ceased to please" their original owners. The narrow
quarters of the tyros are encumbered by ungainly sofas and arm-chairs,
most probably of carved rosewood. _Etageres_ of the same lugubrious
material grace the corners of their tiny drawing-room, the bits of mirror
inserted between the shelves distorting the image of the owners into
headless or limbless phantoms. Half of their little dining-room is
filled with a black-walnut sideboard, ingeniously contrived to take up as
much space as possible and hold nothing, its graceless top adorned with a
stag's head carved in wood and imitation antlers.

The novices in their innocence live contented amid their hideous
surroundings for a year or two, when the wife enters her second epoch,
which, for want of a better word, we will call the Japanese period. The
grim furniture gradually disappears under a layer of silk and gauze
draperies, the bare walls blossom with paper umbrellas, fans are nailed
in groups promiscuously, wherever an empty space offends her eye. Bows
of ribbon are attached to every possible protuberance of the furniture.
Even the table service is not spared. I remember dining at a house in
this stage of its artistic development, where the marrow bones that
formed one course of the dinner appeared each with a coquettish little
bow-knot of pink ribbon around its neck.

Once launched on this sea of adornment, the housewife soon loses her
bearings and decorates indiscriminately. Her old evening dresses serve
to drape the