I helped your grandmother prepare for her wedding.  I cut out and fitted all the apparel of that happy day.  I hear her scold the young folks now for being so dressy, but I can tell you she was once that way herself.  Did not I, sixty years ago, lie on the shelf and laugh as I saw her stand by the half hour before the glass, giving an extra twist to her curl and an additional dash of white powder on her hair—­now fretted because the powder was too thick, now fretted because it was too thin?  She was as proud in cambric and calico and nankeen as Harriet is to-day in white tulle and organdy.  I remember how careful she was when she ran me along the edges of the new dress.  With me she clipped and notched and gored and trimmed, and day and night I went click! click! click! and it seemed as if she would never let me rest from cutting.

I split the rags for the first carpet on the old homestead, and what a merry time we had when the neighbors came to “the quilting!” I lay on the coverlet that was stretched across the quilting-frame and heard all the gossip of 1799.  Reputations were ripped and torn just as they are now.  Fashions were chattered about, the coalscuttle bonnet of some offensive neighbor (who was not invited to the quilting) was criticised, and the suspicion started that she laced too tight; and an old man who happened to have the best farm in the county was overhauled for the size of his knee-buckles, and the exorbitant ruffles on his shirt, and the costly silk lace to his hat.  I lay so still that no one supposed I was listening.  I trembled on the coverlet with rage and wished that I could clip the end of their tattling tongues, but found no chance for revenge, till, in the hand of a careless neighbor, I notched and nearly spoiled the patch-work.

Yes, I am a pair of old scissors.  I cut out many a profile of old-time faces, and the white dimity bed curtains.  I lay on the stand when your grandparents were courting—­for that had to be done then as well as now—­and it was the same story of chairs wide apart, and chairs coming nearer, and arm over the back of the chair, and late hours, and four or five gettings up to go with the determination to stay, protracted interviews on the front steps, blushes and kisses.  Your great-grandmother, out of patience at the lateness of the hour, shouted over the banister to your immediate grandmother, “Mary! come to bed!” Because the old people sit in the corner looking so very grave, do not suppose their eyes were never roguish, nor their lips ruby, nor their hair flaxen, nor their feet spry, nor that they always retired at half-past eight o’clock at night.  After a while, I, the scissors, was laid on the shelf, and finally thrown into a box among nails and screws and files.  Years of darkness and disgrace for a scissors so highly born as I. But one day I was hauled out.  A bell tinkled in the street.  An Italian scissors-grinder wanted a job.  I was put upon the stone, and the grinder put his