"Things Using Us."
It was my first visit from a home full of children, and not too full of Things, to a house where there were no children, and where the Things were in the greatest abundance and the completest preservation. Gardens and hot-houses without a broken stem; flowers evidently never gathered except by strictly authorized hands. Rooms studded fearlessly with ornaments from all ends of the earth and all kingdoms of nature; stuffed birds in domed glass sepulchres, wonderful to me, and unlife-like as the Tomb cities of Egypt; delicate fragile porcelain, and exquisite statuettes, evidently needing no protection from little investigating fingers; carpets needing no protection from little stirring feet. Gradually there settled down on me an awe-stricken sense of being perpetually watched with anxious solicitude, and of having to walk mentally, morally, and corporeally quite upright in the middle of all clear spaces, so as not to interfere with any of the sacred Things wherewith I was surrounded; until, finally, came the retiring to rest on an ancient damask-curtained bed, in a stately, solemn chamber, with a heavy consciousness of being like an insignificant, and, at the same time, rather dangerous fly in a world constructed with no reference to flies,—a crushing conviction of having nothing, and consequently being nothing in a universe of Things,—a mingled feeling of responsibility and insignificance culminating in a depressed apprehension of accountability to the lords and possessors of this universe of possessions, who thus graciously suffered an extraneous atom endowed with a perilous power of motion to enter it.
All this came to a climax when the housekeeper, who had herself, in some dim traditional past, watched over the slumbers of children now developed into the guardians of similar shrines, "tucked me up" and left me alone with the Things.
Ah, the mockery of that "tucking up" in the vast spaces of a bed which reckoned its chronology by centuries! She might as well have talked of "tucking up" a mouse under the dome of St. Paul's.
Visions of a cozy crib at home, flanked by sundry other cribs and cradles, and soothed by a dim murmur of nurses' voices through the half-open door, came tenderly over me, with a wonder how it looked that evening to the two loving faces which bent over it every night. But the very thought of those faces broke the icy spell which had been freezing me, and seemed to fold me up to sleep.
Then, all at once, from all corners of the antique room, came the strangest chucklings and gurglings of half-suppressed laughter; and the fire in the vast old chimney began to make the most uncouth caperings and flickerings, as if it were dancing to some wild elfish music.
"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed the little Dresden china Cupids around the toilet-glass (and that they should laugh might not seem so strange); but the solemn old bed itself chuckled a fat "Ho! ho! ho!" until its heavy draperies shook again; the very tongs held its sides for laughing; and the little modern poker, which did all the work, screamed a plebeian "He! he! he!" in response.