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 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.