as though about to depart on a journey.  On my writing-table another set stood around my inkstand and pen-rack, who, pointing to those on the floor, seemed to debate some question among themselves; while others of them appeared to be collecting and packing away in tiny trunks certain fairy treasures, preparatory to a general departure.  When I looked at the social hearth, at my wife’s sofa and work-basket, I saw similar appearances of dissatisfaction and confusion.  It was evident that the household fairies were discussing the question of a general and simultaneous removal.  I groaned in spirit, and, stretching out my hand, began a conciliatory address, when whisk went the whole scene from before my eyes, and I awaked to behold the form of my wife asking me if I were ill or had had the nightmare that I groaned so.  I told her my dream, and we laughed at it together.

“We must give way to the girls a little,” she said.  “It is natural, you know, that they should wish us to appear a little as other people do.  The fact is, our parlor is somewhat dilapidated; think how many years we have lived in it without an article of new furniture.”

“I hate new furniture,” I remarked, in the bitterness of my soul.  “I hate anything new.”

My wife answered me discreetly, according to approved principles of diplomacy.  I was right.  She sympathized with me.  At the same time, it was not necessary, she remarked, that we should keep a hole in our sofa-cover and arm-chair; there would certainly be no harm in sending them to the upholsterer’s to be new-covered; she didn’t much mind, for her part, moving her plants to the south back-room, and the bird would do well enough in the kitchen:  I had often complained of him for singing vociferously when I was reading aloud.

So our sofa went to the upholsterer’s; but the upholsterer was struck with such horror at its clumsy, antiquated, unfashionable appearance, that he felt bound to make representations to my wife and daughters:  positively, it would be better for them to get a new one, of a tempting pattern, which he showed them, than to try to do anything with that.  With a stitch or so here and there it might do for a basement dining-room; but, for a parlor, he gave it as his disinterested opinion,—­he must say, if the case were his own, he should get, etc., etc.  In short, we had a new sofa and new chairs, and the plants and the birds were banished, and some dark green blinds were put up to exclude the sun from the parlor, and the blessed luminary was allowed there only at rare intervals when my wife and daughters were out shopping, and I acted out my uncivilized male instincts by pulling up every shade and vivifying the apartment as in days of old.