old chamber-dust an inch deep on the floor,
cobwebs festooning the girders--and piled from floor to ceiling on the
principle of getting the largest bulk into the least room, with barrels,
boxes, bales, baskets, chests, crates, and carboys--merchandise of all
description, from the rough, raw material to the most exquisite _choses
de luxe_. The inmost layers are inextricable without pulling down the
outer ones. If you want a particular case of broadcloth you must clear
yourself an alleyway through a hundred tierces of hams, and last week's
entry of clayed sugars is inaccessible without tumbling on your head a
mountain of Yankee notions.

In my nephew's unfortunate youth such storage as this had minds. As long
as the crown of his brain's arch was not crushed in by some intellectual
Furman Street diaster, those stevedores of learning, the schoolmasters,
kept on unloading the Rome and Athens lighters into a boy's crowded
skull, and breaking out of the hold of that colossal old junk, The
Pure Mathematics, all the formulas which could be crowded into the
interstices between his Latin and Greek. At the time I introduce Billy,
both Lu and her husband were much changed. They had gained a great
deal in width of view and liberality of judgment. They read Dickens and
Thackeray with avidity; went now and then to the opera; proposed to let
Billy take a quarter at Dod-worth's; had statues in their parlor without
any thought of shame at their lack of petticoats, and did multitudes of
things which, in their early married life, they would have considered
shocking. Part of this change was due to the great increase of travel,
the wonderful progress in art and refinement which has enlarged this
generation's thought and corrected its ignorant opinions; infusing
cosmopolitanism into our manners by a revolution so gradual that its
subjects were a new people before their combativeness became alarmed,
yet so rapid that a man of thirty can scarcely believe his birthday, and
questions whether he has not added his life up wrong by a century or so
when he compares his own boy-Hood with that of the present day. But a
good deal of the transformation resulted from the means of gratifying
elegant tastes, the comfort, luxury, and culture which came with
Lovegrove's retirement on a fortune. They had mellowed on the sunny
shelves of prosperity, like every good thing which has an astringent
skin when it is green. They would greatly have liked to see Daniel sh