which Chaos herself might have planned in one of her happier moments.
Carpets, blankets, shawls, pictures, mirrors, rocking-chairs, and blue
overalls hang from the ceiling, and devious pathways wind amidst piles of
ready-made clothing, show-cases filled with every sort of knick-knack and
half hidden under heaps of hats and boots and shoes, bookcases,
secretaries, chests of drawers, mattresses, lounges, and bedsteads, to the
stairway of a loft similarly appointed, and to a back room overflowing
with glassware and crockery. These things are not all second-hand, but
they are all old and equally pathetic. The melancholy of ruinous auction
sales, of changing tastes or changing fashions, clings to them, whether
they are things that have never had a home and have been on sale ever
since they were made, or things that have been associated with every phase
of human life.

Among other objects, certain large glass vases, ornamented by the polite
art of potichomanie, have long appealed to my fancy, wherein they
capriciously allied themselves to the history of aging single women in
lonely New England village houses,--pathetic sisters lingering upon the
neutral ground between the faded hopes of marriage and the yet unrisen
prospects of consumption. The work implies an imperfect yet real love of
beauty, the leisure for it a degree of pecuniary ease: the thoughts of the
sisters rise above the pickling and preserving that occupied their
heartier and happier mother; they are in fact in that aesthetic, social,
and intellectual mean, in which single women are thought soonest to wither
and decline. With a little more power, and in our later era, they would be
writing stories full of ambitious, unintelligible, self-devoted and sudden
collapsing young girls and amazing doctors; but as they are, and in their
time, they must do what they can. A sentimentalist may discern on these
vases not only the gay designs with which they ornamented them, but their
own dim faces looking wan from the windows of some huge old homestead, a