the show-rooms of many of these shops. One that I visited, a glass
show-room containing chandeliers priced upwards of a thousand dollars, and
all varieties of fancy-wares of every description, had large mirrors at
the ends of the room, covering the entire walls, and producing the
grandest effect conceivable. The objects in the room were thus infinitely
multiplied in both directions, so that whichever way one turned his face,
glittering glassware was seen "as far as the eye could reach."

Such sights are simply bewildering! It is a little difficult to gain
admittance to the manufacturing departments of many of these places, but
to literary characters that represent "newspapers," the doors are
generally opened quite readily. In hunting these shops, I discovered a
great want of system in the naming and numbering of the streets of this
otherwise quite elegant city. I had passed a certain street twice, from
end to end, in search of a particular number. Upon further inquiry, I
learned that what I had considered one street, was numbered and named as
two, though there was not the slightest deviation from a perfectly
straight line at any point of it. To make bad worse, the houses were
counted and numbered upwards on one side of the street, and downwards on
the other side. In such a city the stranger must find places by
_speculation!_

Strange things one meets at every step in Europe, and soon gets so used
to it, that it seems the strangest to see something that is not strange;
but oddities are perhaps no plentier on one side of the Atlantic than they
are on the other, and are equally amusing everywhere. Upon the burial
ground of St. Philip's, stands a monument in honor and memory of a wife
that died at the age of fifty-nine years, which has a bee-hive and the
inscription: "She looked well to the ways of her household, and did not
eat the bread of idleness."