[Illustration: THE PROGRESS OF FASHION. (p. 432) ] The stormy petrels of disaster had frequently appeared over the fluctuating sea of our commercial life, covering it in 1837, and in every few successive epochs since, with its screaming, ill-omened, harpy brood, while fleets and single vessels of mercantile adventure broke up and lined the shore with their shattered wrecks. Then as now the owner sometimes turned wrecker of his own cargo, and often made more from the stranded pieces than he would have netted from the entire cargo had it arrived safely in port; as the expected payment of its purchase price would then have reduced the profits. This species of mercantile salvage, by which the proprietor profits by his losses, although not unknown to the traders of Carthage, has had an extension in modern days, that threatens to put merchandizing among those equivocal ventures, which puzzle casuists in cases of conscience, and often defy even the doctrine of chances as to the payment. The discovery, in 1848, of gold in California bestowed upon America the Midas-touch it had fervently prayed for. Gold, sweated from the pores of labor, was sprinkled in a dusty shower upon the head of beauty, dropped in bars upon the scales of the vendors of dry goods and wet goods, filmed the eyes of marriageable girls with an aureous ophthalmia which indisposed them to see any desirable wedding unless it was golden, and so veneered the duties and chairs of railway directors, members of the legislature and of Congress, with a yellow smearing, that nearly all bills, resolutions, or orders have refused to dip into or drink from any stream but Pactolus. Many homes, however, through that half-century, we are happy to say, unwatered by the curse of that thirsty stream, had taken root and sent up solid shafts whose numerous branches bloomed with bountiful clusters, while sweet-smelling vines, springing alongside the family trees from the roots of the simple love-knots, spread a protecting shade over many a family roof-tree. Curiously enough, Midas always had a spite against children, which grow up thickest among heaps of clam-shells and on poor side-hills. Into our flowering ecclesiastial garden, planted with every known variety, and exhibiting large and vigorous growths, Joseph Smith—a Vermont simple—introduced, in 1827, a new shrub. It bore at first a double Mormon flower-looking tip, distributed in pretty equal numbers on its deep-green, sucker-like shoots; but transplanted first to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1838, and ten years later to the alkaline soil of Utah, it immediately bore the female variety in alarming disproportion. This Salt Lake shrub—of the _genus polygamous_—has become by cultivation a very rank weed, smelling earthily to heaven. Its numerous Young off-shoots require severe cutting, if not distinct subsoil treatment.