furniture are apt to take on from long association, and which we should
instantly recognize could they be confronted with their late proprietors.
It seems, in very imaginative moments, as if the strange assemblage of
incongruities must have a consciousness of these latent resemblances,
which the individual pieces betray when their present keeper turns the key
upon them, and abandons them to themselves at night; and I have sometimes
fancied such an effect in the late twilight, when I have wandered into
their resting-place, and have beheld them in the unnatural glare of a
kerosene lamp burning before a brightly polished reflector, and casting
every manner of grotesque shadow upon the floor and walls. But this may
have been an illusion; at any rate I am satisfied that the bargain-driving
capacity of the storekeeper is not in the least affected by a weird
quality in his wares; though they have not failed to impart to him
something of their own desultory character. He sometimes leaves a neighbor
in charge when he goes to meals, and then, if I enter, I am watchfully
followed about from corner to corner, and from room to room, lest I pocket
a mattress or slip a book-case under my coat. The storekeeper himself
never watches me; perhaps he knows that it is a purely professional
interest I take in the collection; that I am in the trade and have a
secondhand shop of my own, full of poetical rubbish, and every sort of
literary odds and ends, picked up at random, and all cast higgledy-
piggledy into the same chaotic receptacle. His customers are as little
like ordinary shoppers as he is like common tradesmen. They are in part
the Canadians who work in the brickyards, and it is surprising to find how
much business can be transacted, and how many sharp bargains struck
without the help of a common language. I am in the belief, which may be
erroneous, that nobody is wronged in these trades. The taciturn
storekeeper, who regards his customers with a stare of solemn amusement as
Critturs born by some extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a
language that practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffers