injury. Mr. Pullet was a small man, with a high nose, small twinkling
eyes, and thin lips, in a fresh-looking suit of black and a white
cravat, that seemed to have been tied very tight on some higher
principle than that of mere personal ease. He bore about the same
relation to his tall, good-looking wife, with her balloon sleeves,
abundant mantle, and a large befeathered and beribboned bonnet, as a
small fishing-smack bears to a brig with all its sails spread.

It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity
introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilization, the
sight of a fashionably dressed female in grief. From the sorrow of a
Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with several
bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate ribbon
strings, what a long series of gradations! In the enlightened child of
civilization the abandonment characteristic of grief is checked and
varied in the subtlest manner, so as to present an interesting problem
to the analytic mind. If, with a crushed heart and eyes half blinded
by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too-devious step through
a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves too, and the deep
consciousness of this possibility produces a composition of forces by
which she takes a line that just clears the door-post. Perceiving that
the tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her strings and throws them
languidly backward, a touching gesture, indicative, even in the
deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry moments when cap-strings will
once more have a charm. As the tears subside a little, and with her
head leaning backward at the angle that will not injure her bonnet,
she endures that terrible moment when grief, which has made all things
else a weariness, has itself become weary; she looks down pensively at
her bracelets, and adjusts their clasps with that pretty studied
fortuity which would be gratifying to her mind if it were once more in