The scene changes, as the clock strikes in the entry.  We are lingering in the piazza of the Winged Lion, and the bronze giants in their turret overlooking the square raise their hammers and beat the solemn march of Time.  As we float away through the watery streets, old Shylock shuffles across the bridge,—­black barges glide by us in the silent canals,—­groups of unfamiliar faces lean from the balconies,—­and we hear the plashing waters lap the crumbling walls of Venice, with its dead Doges and decaying palaces.

Again we stir the fire, and feel it is home all about us.  But we like to sit here and think of that rosy evening, last summer, when we came walking into Interlachen, and beheld the ghost-like figure of the Jungfrau issuing out of her cloudy palace to welcome the stars,—­of a cool, bright, autumnal morning on the western battlements overlooking Genoa, the blue Mediterranean below mirroring the silent fleet that lay so motionless on its bosom,—­of a midnight visit to the Colosseum with a band of German students, who bore torches in and out of the time-worn arches, and sang their echoing songs to the full moon,—­of days, how many and how magical! when we awoke every morning to say, “We are in Rome!”

But it grows late, and it is time now to give over these reflections.  So we wind up our watch, and put out the candle.

* * * * *

A DRY-GOODS JOBBER IN 1861.

What is a dry-goods jobber?  No wonder you ask.  You have been hunting, perhaps, for our peripatetic postoffice, and have stumbled upon Milk Street and Devonshire Street and Franklin Street.  You are almost ready to believe in the lamp of Aladdin, that could build palaces in a night.  Looking up to the stately and costly structures which have usurped the place of once familiar dwellings, and learning that they are, for the most part, tenanted by dry-goods jobbers, you feel that for such huge results there must needs be an adequate cause, and so you ask, What is a dry-goods jobber?

It is more than a curious question.  For parents desirous of finding their true sphere for promising and for unpromising sons, it is eminently a practical question.  It is a question comprehensive of dollars and cents,—­also of bones and sinews, of muscles, nerves, and brains, of headache, heartache, and the cyclopaedia of being, doing, and enduring.  An adequate answer to such a question must needs ask your indulgence, for it cannot be condensed into a very few words.

A dry-goods jobber is a wholesale buyer and seller, for cash or for approved credit, of all manner of goods, wares, and materials, large and small, coarse and fine, foreign and domestic, which pertain to the clothing, convenience, and garnishing, by night and by day, of men, women, and children:  from a button to a blanket; from a calico to a carpet; from stockings to a head-dress; from an inside handkerchief to a waterproof; from a piece of tape to a thousand bales of shirtings; not forgetting linen, silk, or woollen fabrics, for drapery or upholstery, for bed or table, including hundreds of items which time would fail me to recite.  All these the dry-goods jobber provides for his customer, the retailer, who in his turn will dispense them to the consumer.