responsibility of her visitor for that limited
amount, and departed to inform her mistress.

The customer took an observation.

The room was a neatly-furnished parlor, a little flashy perhaps
in the article of mirrors, but the sofas, chairs, carpet, &c.,
were plain and not offensive to good taste. A piano was in the
room, but it was closed, and its tone and quality are unknown.
One curious article, for a parlor ornament, stood in the corner
of the room; it was the huge sign-board of a perfumery store, and
bore in large letters the name of a dealer in sweet-scented
merchandise, blazoned thereon in all the finery of Dutch metal
and bronze. This conspicuous article, though mysterious and
unaccountable, was not cabalistic, and savored not of witchcraft.

Presently the quiet colored girl returned, and in a low voice,
and with a subdued well-trained manner, invited her visitor to
follow her; meekly obeying, he was led up two flights of
respectable stairs into a room wherein there was nothing
mysterious, nor was there anything particularly suggestive
except a large glass case filled with a stock of perfumery. What
was the propriety of so very many bottles filled with perfumes
and medicines did not at first appear; but the assortment of
imprisoned odors, and liquid drugs, and the store-sign down
stairs, and Madame Clifton, and a certain perfumery store in
Broadway, and the proprietor thereof, so tangled themselves
together in the brain of the inquirer that he has never since
that time been able to disconnect one from the other.

Upon a small stand were two packs of cards--the one an ordinary
playing pack, and the other what are known sometimes as
fortune-telling cards. The devices on these latter differed
materially from those in ordinary use; there were no plain cards;
every one was ornamented with some kind of a significant design;
there were pictures of women, of men, of ships and raging seas,
of hearses, and sickbeds, and shrouds, and coffins, and corpses,
and graves, and tombstones, and similar cheerful objects; then
there were squares, and circles, and hands with scales, and
hands with daggers, and hands sticking through clouds, and purses
of money, and carriages, and moons, and suns, and serpents, and
hearts, and Cupids, and eyes, and rays of light coming from
nowhere, and shining on nothing, and Herculeses with big clubs,
and big arms, bigger than the clubs, and big legs, bigger than
both together, and swords, a