world too wide for the shrunken family. All April long the door-yard trees
crouch and shudder in the sour east, all June they rain canker-worms upon
the roof, and then in autumn choke the eaves with a fall of tattered and
hectic foliage. From the window the fading sisters gaze upon the unnatural
liveliness of the summer streets through which the summer boarders are
driving, or upon the death-white drifts of the intolerable winter. Their
father, the captain, is dead; he died with the Calcutta trade, having
survived their mother, and left them a hopeless competency and yonder
bamboo chairs; their only brother is in California; one, though she loved,
had never a lover; her sister's betrothed married West, whither he went to
make a home for her,--and ah! is it vases for the desolate parlor mantel
they decorate, or funeral urns? And when in time, they being gone, the
Californian brother sends to sell out at auction the old place with the
household and kitchen furniture, is it withered rose-leaves or ashes that
the purchaser finds in these jars?

They are empty now; and I wonder how came they here? How came the show-
case of Dr. Merrifield, Surgeon-Chiropodist here? How came here yon
Italian painting?--a poor, silly, little affected Madonna, simpering at me
from her dingy gilt frame till I buy her, a great bargain, at a dollar.
From what country church or family oratory, in what revolution, or stress
of private fortunes,--then from what various cabinets of antiquities, in
what dear Vicenza, or Ferrara, or Mantua, earnest thou, O Madonna? Whose
likeness are you, poor girl, with your everyday prettiness of brows and
chin, and your Raphaelesque crick in the neck? I think I know a part of
your story. You were once the property of that ruined advocate, whose
sensibilities would sometimes consent that a _valet de place_ of
uncommon delicacy should bring to his ancestral palace some singularly
meritorious foreigner desirous of purchasing from his rare collection,--a
collection of rubbish scarcely to be equaled elsewhere in Italy. You hung