of dim children, parents, cousins, aunts, and friends, in all attitudes but customary ones; no templed portico at back, and manufactured landscape stretching away in the distance—­that came in later, with the photograph; all these vague figures lavishly chained and ringed—­metal indicated and secured from doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid gold bronze; all of them too much combed, too much fixed up; and all of them uncomfortable in inflexible Sunday-clothes of a pattern which the spectator cannot realize could ever have been in fashion; husband and wife generally grouped together—­husband sitting, wife standing, with hand on his shoulder—­and both preserving, all these fading years, some traceable effect of the daguerreotypist’s brisk ’Now smile, if you please!’ Bracketed over what-not—­place of special sacredness—­an outrage in water-color, done by the young niece that came on a visit long ago, and died.  Pity, too; for she might have repented of this in time.  Horse-hair chairs, horse-hair sofa which keeps sliding from under you.  Window shades, of oil stuff, with milk-maids and ruined castles stenciled on them in fierce colors.  Lambrequins dependent from gaudy boxings of beaten tin, gilded.  Bedrooms with rag carpets; bedsteads of the ‘corded’ sort, with a sag in the middle, the cords needing tightening; snuffy feather-bed—­not aired often enough; cane-seat chairs, splint-bottomed rocker; looking-glass on wall, school-slate size, veneered frame; inherited bureau; wash-bowl and pitcher, possibly —­but not certainly; brass candlestick, tallow candle, snuffers.  Nothing else in the room.  Not a bathroom in the house; and no visitor likely to come along who has ever seen one.

That was the residence of the principal citizen, all the way from the suburbs of New Orleans to the edge of St. Louis.  When he stepped aboard a big fine steamboat, he entered a new and marvelous world:  chimney-tops cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumes—­and maybe painted red; pilot-house, hurricane deck, boiler-deck guards, all garnished with white wooden filigree work of fanciful patterns; gilt acorns topping the derricks; gilt deer-horns over the big bell; gaudy symbolical picture on the paddle-box, possibly; big roomy boiler-deck, painted blue, and furnished with Windsor armchairs; inside, a far-receding snow-white ‘cabin;’ porcelain knob and oil-picture on every stateroom door; curving patterns of filigree-work touched up with gilding, stretching overhead all down the converging vista; big chandeliers every little way, each an April shower of glittering glass-drops; lovely rainbow-light falling everywhere from the colored glazing of the skylights; the whole a long-drawn, resplendent tunnel, a bewildering and soul-satisfying spectacle!  In the ladies’ cabin a pink and white Wilton carpet, as soft as mush, and glorified with a ravishing pattern of gigantic flowers.  Then the Bridal Chamber—­the animal that invented that idea was still alive and