All this kept Miss Belinda Bree from utterly wearing out at her dull work in the great warerooms, or now and then at days' seamstressing in families. It really keeps a great many people from wearing out. Miss Bree's work _was_ dull. The days of her early "mantua making" were over. Twenty years had made things very different in Boston. The "nice families" had been more quiet then; the quietest of them now cannot manage things as they did in those days; for the same reason that you cannot buy old-fashioned "wearing" goods; they are not in the market. "Sell and wear out; wear out and sell;" that is the principle of to-day. You must do as the world does; there is no other path cut through. If you travel, you must keep on night and day, or wait twenty-four hours and start in the night again. Nobody--or scarcely anybody--has a dress-maker now, in the old, cosy way, of the old, cosy sort, staying a week, looking over the wardrobes of the whole family, advising, cutting, altering, remaking, getting into ever so much household interest and history in the daily chat, and listening over daily work: sitting at the same table; linking herself in with things, spring and fall, as the leaves do with their goings and comings; or like the equinoxes, that in March and September shut about us with friendly curtains of rain for days, in which so much can be done in the big up-stairs room with a cheerful fire, that is devoted to the rites and mysteries of scissors and needle. We were always glad, I remember, when our dress-making week fell in with the equinoctial. But now, all poor Miss Bree's "best places" had slipped away from her, and her life had changed. People go to great outfitting stores, buy their goods, have themselves measured, and leave the whole thing to result a week afterward in a big box sent home with everything fitted and machined and finished, with the last inventions and accumulations of frills, tucks, and reduplications; and at the bottom of the box a bill tucked and reduplicated in the same modern proportions. Miss Bree had now to go out, like any other machine girl, to the warerooms; except when she took home particular hand-work of button holes and trimmings, or occasionally engaged herself for two or three days to some family mother who could not pay the big bills, and who ran her own machine, cut her own basques and gores, and hired help for basting and finishing. She had almost done with even this; most people liked young help; brisker with their needles, sewing without glasses, nicer and fresher looking to have about. Poor "Aunt Blin" overheard one man ask his wife in her dressing-room before dinner, "Why, if she must have a stitching-woman in the house, she couldn't find a more comfortable one to look at; somebody a little bright and cheerful to bring to the table, instead of that old callariper?"