Picture, then, to yourself a medley somewhat like what follows; to wit: old broken bedsteads, and worn-out sacking; a battered warming-pan; a copper kettle, with a great hole in the bottom; a quantity of old bottles and phials, pots of paint dried up as hard as granite, old stumps of paint brushes, shreds of canvas, broken casts and an easel, once the property of a poor painter who once was a boarder in my uncle’s house; pine-boards and scraps of mahogany furniture, of every shape and size—old rags—old mouldy boots and shoes—old picture-frames; bits of window-glass and looking-glass; old rusty keys, old coffee-mills—and great iron wheels that seem as incomprehensible as those of Ezekiel; old greasy boxes, with something old and mysterious in every one of them—battered old trunks, without tops to them; quantities of empty bottles, and one or two forsaken demijohns, (my uncle and aunt have joined the Temperance Society;) great heaps of rusty iron—saws without handles or teeth; locks without keys or springs; scraps of bell-wire; bells without tongues; doll-babies without heads or legs; broken-down chairs and tables; knives and forks without handles, broken pitchers, bags of dried sage, antiquated andirons, fire-shovels, tongs, fenders and battered fire-boards, and—but I can remember no more—the rest the reader may fill out _ad libitum_. My recording muse halts, and hastens out to take a whiff of fresh air, and refresh her soul with something green and living—something that belongs to the present rather than to the past. We will leave this museum of antiquities, though we have not half described it, and transport ourselves to my aunt’s snug little breakfast parlor, on the first floor. Time—about a year ago, one fine spring morning, after breakfast. Present—Aunt Fabbins, Uncle Fabbins, the five Miss Fabbinses, and the three Mr. Fabbinses, my cousins, myself and the cat. The ladies were washing up the breakfast things and putting the room in order, my uncle was reading the paper, and the three sons and myself—contemplating the rest of the party; when the following conversation arose. “I wish,” said Jemima, partly to herself, and partly that her father and mother might hear—“I wish, upon my soul, that something would happen which would clear this house of some of its rubbish. I can’t find room for these books on the shelf, for the old newspapers have taken complete possession. I am obliged to convert the top of my piano into a book-shelf—and I don’t think I shall submit to it. There is no room for half the things that are in the house. I have half a mind, I declare, to turn some of these piles of trash into the street.”