Papa holding a book
('Constitution of the United States'); guitar leaning against mamma,
blue ribbons fluttering from its neck; the young ladies, as children, in
slippers and scalloped pantelettes, one embracing toy horse, the other
beguiling kitten with ball of yarn, and both simpering up at mamma, who
simpers back.
These persons all fresh, raw, and red - apparently skinned.
Opposite, in gilt frame, grandpa and grandma, at thirty and twenty-two,
stiff, old-fashioned, high-collared, puff-sleeved, glaring pallidly out
from a background of solid Egyptian night. Under a glass French clock
dome, large bouquet of stiff flowers done in corpsy-white wax.
Pyramidal what-not in the corner, the shelves occupied chiefly with
bric-a-brac of the period, disposed with an eye to best effect: shell,
with the Lord's Prayer carved on it; another shell - of the long-oval
sort, narrow, straight orifice, three inches long, running from end to
end - portrait of Washington carved on it; not well done; the shell had
Washington's mouth, originally - artist should have built to that. These
two are memorials of the long-ago bridal trip to New Orleans and the
French Market. Other bric-a-brac: Californian 'specimens' - quartz, with
gold wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet of ancestral
hair in it; Indian arrow-heads, of flint; pair of bead moccasins, from
uncle who crossed the Plains; three 'alum' baskets of various colors -
being skeleton-frame of wire, clothed-on with cubes of crystallized alum
in the rock-candy style - works of art which were achieved by the young
ladies; their doubles and duplicates to be found upon all what-nots in
the land; convention of desiccated bugs and butterflies pinned to a
card; painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment - drops its under
jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candy rabbit - limbs and
features merged together, not strongly defined; pewter presidential-
campaign medal; miniature card-board wood-sawyer, to be attached to the
stove-pipe and operated by the heat; small Napoleon, done in wax;
spread-open daguerreotypes 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
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