As long ago as my first acquaintance in my Aunt Fabbins’s family, I remember these heaps and accretions of useless rubbish. I remember how they excited my boyish curiosity and imagination. Visions of dark closets piled to the very ceiling with all the nameless odds and ends in the annals of housekeeping, are even now hovering before me. There were strata and substrata—primary, secondary, and tertiary formations. There were shelves, and boxes, and old chests, and barrels of things which seemed as if they never had a name, much less a use—things that seemed as if they must have dropped out of the moon, or might have once belonged to some inhabitant of the planet Saturn, who had come to take lodgings on our earth, and had forgotten to take away all his old traps. Every closet, nook and corner of the house was filled with these antique remnants. For years the process of accumulation had gone on, silently, and almost invisibly, like the formation of stalactites in a cave. And whenever it became absolutely necessary that a portion of the rubbish should be removed—do not for a moment suppose that it was thrown into the street, or sold at auction, or even given to the poor, (although my Aunt Fabbins was charity herself to all who were in want,) but every thing was taken from below stairs, and transferred to the garret. This was the great receptacle of all fragments—this was the final resting-place—the charnel-house, or say rather kingdom of the dead, where the ghosts of the departed dumb servants of the household at last congregated in peaceful and undisturbed repose. And now we have reached this dim land of shadows at length, not as the ancients did, by descending, but by ascending—to the very top of the house, we may draw forth our key and unlock the sacred door, and enter, reverently if we can—we have reached MY AUNT FABBINS’S GARRET. But, ah! how can I describe it, when I have no other light but memory to enable me to grope through it? Yet will I endeavor, as well as I can, to throw a little light upon this dark, silent abode of mysteries. We open the door, then. A strong odor,—compounded of various ingredients, the chief of which seem to be salt fish, bacon, grease, dried herbs and old leather,—assails our olfactories;—“A most ancient and fish-like smell, a sort of, not the newest, poorjohn.” We enter a dark apartment, with a low ceiling, the greater part of it sloping with the roof, and very much stained by the rains which have leaked through. A dim light beams through a single window, the panes of which are very dusty and cracked. We will seat ourselves on a couple of old candle-boxes, and commence our inventory of the contents in all due form, as well as the light of memory and the dim window-glass will permit.