Of
course there are in every house certain objects of comfort and even
ornament which in a state of repose derive a sort of dignity from being
cracked, or scratched, or organically debilitated, and give an idea of
ancestral possession and of long descent to the actual owner; and you must
not hope that this venerable quality will survive their public exposure
upon the furniture wagon. There it instantly perishes, like the
consequence of some country notable huddled and hustled about in the
graceless and ignorant tumult of a great city. To tell the truth, the
number of things that turn shabby under the ordeal of moving strikes a
pang of unaccustomed poverty to the heart which, loving all manner of
makeshifts, is rich even in its dilapidations. For the time you feel
degraded by the spectacle of that forlornness, and if you are a man of
spirit, you try to sneak out of association with it in the mind of the
passer-by; you keep scrupulously in-doors, or if a fancied exigency
obliges you to go back and forth between the old house and the new, you
seek obscure by-ways remote from the great street down which the wagon
flaunts your ruin and decay, and time your arrivals and departures so as
to have the air of merely dropping in at either place.
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