That is what it comes to.  One may feign that these storage warehouses are cities, but they are really cemeteries:  sad columbaria on whose shelves are stowed exanimate things once so intimately of their owners’ lives that it is with the sense of looking at pieces and bits of one’s dead self that one revisits them.  If one takes the fragments out to fit them to new circumstance, one finds them not only uncomformable and incapable, but so volubly confidential of the associations in which they are steeped, that one wishes to hurry them back to their cell and lock it upon them forever.  One feels then that the old way was far better, and that if the things had been auctioned off, and scattered up and down, as chance willed, to serve new uses with people who wanted them enough to pay for them even a tithe of their cost, it would have been wiser.  Failing this, a fire seems the only thing for them, and their removal to the cheaper custody of a combustible or slow-burning warehouse the best recourse.  Desperate people, aging husbands and wives, who have attempted the reconstruction of their homes with these

     “Portions and parcels of the dreadful past”

have been known to wish for an earthquake, even, that would involve their belongings in an indiscriminate ruin.

II.

In fact, each new start in life should be made with material new to you, if comfort is to attend the enterprise.  It is not only sorrowful but it is futile to store your possessions, if you hope to find the old happiness in taking them out and using them again.  It is not that they will not go into place, after a fashion, and perform their old office, but that the pang they will inflict through the suggestion of the other places where they served their purpose in other years will be only the keener for the perfection with which they do it now.  If they cannot be sold, and if no fire comes down from heaven to consume them, then they had better be stored with no thought of ever taking them out again.

That will be expensive, or it will be inexpensive, according to the sort of storage they are put into.  The inexperienced in such matters may be surprised, and if they have hearts they may be grieved, to learn that the fire-proof storage of the furniture of the average house would equal the rent of a very comfortable domicile in a small town, or a farm by which a family’s living can be earned, with a decent dwelling in which it can be sheltered.  Yet the space required is not very great; three fair-sized rooms will hold everything; and there is sometimes a fierce satisfaction in seeing how closely the things that once stood largely about, and seemed to fill ample parlors and chambers, can be packed away.  To be sure they are not in their familiar attitudes; they lie on their sides or backs, or stand upon their heads; between the legs of library or dining tables are stuffed all kinds of minor movables,