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more) flying, and was making great way through a sea of a
regular pattern, like a lady's collar. A benevolent, elderly
gentleman of the last century, with a powdered head, kept
guard, in oil and varnish, over a most perplexing piece of
furniture on a table; in appearance between a driving seat
and an angular knife-box, but, when opened, a musical
instrument of tinkling wires, exactly like David's harp
packed for travelling. Everything became a nick-nack in this
curious room. The copper tea-kettle, burnished up to the
highest point of glory, took his station on a stand of his
own at the greatest possible distance from the fire-place,
and said, "By your leave, not a kittle, but a bijou." The
Staffordshire-ware butter-dish, with the cover on, got upon
a little round occasional table in a window, with a worked
top, and announced itself to the two chairs accidentally
placed there, as an aid to polite conversation, a graceful
trifle in china to be chatted over by callers, as they
airily trifled away the visiting moments of a butterfly
existence, in that rugged old village on the Cumberland
Fells. The very footstool could not keep the floor, but got
upon a sofa, and therefrom proclaimed itself, in high relief
of white and liver-coloured wool, a favourite spaniel coiled
up for repose. Though, truly, in spite of its bright glass
eyes, the spaniel was the least successful assumption in the
collection: being perfectly flat, and dismally suggestive of
a recent mistake in sitting down on the part of some
corpulent member of the family.
There were books, to, in this room; books on the table,
books on the chimney-piece, books in an open press in the
corner. Fielding was there, and Smollet was there, and
Steele and Addison were there, in dispersed volumes; and
there were tales of those who go down to the sea in ships,
for windy nights; and there was a really good choice of good
books for rainy days or fine. It was very pleasant to see
these things in such a lonesome by-place - so very agreeable
to find these evidences of a taste, however homely, that
went beyond the beautiful cleanliness and trimness of the
house - so fanciful to imagine what a wonder a room must be
to the little children born in the gloomy village - what
grand impressions of it those of them who became wanderers
over the earth would carry away; and how, at distant ends of
the world, some old voyagers would die, cherishing the
belief that the finest apartment known to men was once in
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