plush-upholstered sofas and chairs, with their backs and legs of carved
black walnut, had come direct from New York. For pictures there were
early art-chromos, among them the once-prized companion pieces, "Wide
Awake" and "Fast Asleep." Lithography was represented by "The
Fisherman's Pride" and "The Soldier's Dream of Home." In the
handicrafts there were a photographic reproduction of the Lord's
Prayer, illustrated originally by a penman with uncommon genius for
scroll-work; a group of water-lilies in wax, floating on a mirror-lake
and protected by a glass globe; a full-rigged schooner, built cunningly
inside a bottle by a matricide serving a life-sentence in the
penitentiary at San Quinten; and a mechanical canarybird in a gilded
cage, acquired at the Philadelphia Centennial,--a bird that had
carolled its death--lay in the early winter of 1877 when it was wound
up too hard and its little insides snapped. In the parlour a few
ornamental books were grouped with rare precision on the centre-table
with its oval top of white marble. On the walls of the "sitting-room"
were a steel engraving of Abraham Lincoln striking the shackles from a
kneeling slave, and a framed cardboard rebus worked in red zephyr, the
reading of which was "No Cross, No Crown."

Thus far nothing helpful has been found.

Let us examine, then, the what-not in the "sitting-room" and the choice
Empire cabinet that faces it from the opposite wall of the parlour.

The what-not as an American institution is obsolete. Indeed, it has
been rather long since writers referred to it even in terms of
opprobrious sarcasm. The what-not, once the cherished shrine of the
American home, sheltered the smaller household gods for which no other
resting-place could be found. The Empire cabinet, with its rounding