Here are the expensive and tasteful gifts, the _gages d'amour_, not often disinterested, as bright and beautiful as when they left the hands of the jeweller; but the givers and the receivers where are they? Mouldered in the grave long, long years ago! Through how many hands may these objects not have passed since Death snatched away the persons for whom they were originally designed! And here they are in the ignoble custody of some avaricious vender, who having obtained them at the sale of some departed amateur for less than half their first cost, now expects to extort more than double. He takes them up in his unwashed fingers, turns them--oh, profanation!--round and round, in order to display their various merits, descants on the delicacy of the workmanship, the sharpness of the chiseling, the pure water of the brilliants, and the fine taste displayed in the form; tells a hundred lies about the sum he gave for them, the offers he has refused, the persons to whom they once belonged, and those who wish to purchase them! The _flacon_ of some defunct prude is placed side by side with the _vinaigrette_ of some _jolie danseuse_ who was any thing but prudish. How shocked would the original owner of the _flacon_ feel at the friction! The fan of some _grande dame de la cour_ touches the diamond-mounted _étui_ of the wife of some _financier_, who would have given half her diamonds to enter the circle in which she who once owned this fan found more _ennui_ than amusement. The cane of a deceased philosopher is in close contact with the golden-hilted sword of a _petit maître de l'ancien régime_, and the sparkling _tabatière_ of a _Marquis Musqué_, the partaker if not the cause of half his _succès dans le monde_, is placed by the _chapelet_ of a _religieuse de haute naissance_, who often perhaps dropped a tear on the beads as she counted them in saying her Ave Marias, when some unbidden thought of the world she had resigned usurped the place of her aspirations for a brighter and more enduring world.