Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain [125]
Offering, and Affection’s Wreath, with their sappy inanities illustrated in die-away mezzotints; also, Ossian; Alonzo and Melissa; maybe Ivanhoe; also Album, full of original “poetry” of the Thou-hast-wounded-the-spirit-that-loved-thee breed; two or three goody-goody works—Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, etc.; current number of the chaste and innocuous Godey’s Lady’s Book with painted fashion plate of wax-figure women with mouths all alike—lips and eyelids the same size—each five-foot woman with a two-inch wedge sticking from under her dress and letting on to be half of her foot. Polished airtight stove (new and deadly invention), with pipe passing through a board which closes up the discarded good old fireplace. On each end of the wooden mantel, over the fireplace, a large basket of peaches and other fruits, natural size, all done in plaster, rudely, or in wax, and painted to resemble the originals—which they don’t. Over middle of mantel, engraving—Washington Crossing the Delaware; on the wall by the door, copy of it done in thunderand-lightning crewels by one of the young ladies—work of art which would have made Washington hesitate about crossing, if he could have foreseen what advantage was going to be taken of it. Piano—kettle in disguise—with music, bound and unbound, piled on it, and on a stand nearby: “Battle of Prague”; “Bird Waltz”; “Arkansas Traveler”; “Rosin the Bow”; “Marseilles Hymn”; “On a Lone Barren Isle” (St. Helena); “The Last Link Is Broken”; “She Wore a Wreath of Roses the Night When Last We Met”; “Go, Forget Me, Why Should Sorrow o’er that Brow a Shadow Fling”; “Hours There Were to Memory Dearer”; “Long, Long Ago”; “Days of Absence”; “A Life on the Ocean Wave, a Home on the Rolling Deep”; “Bird at Sea”; and spread open on the rack, where the plaintive singer has left it, Ro-holl on, silver moo-hoon, guide the trav-el-lerr his way, etc. Tilted pensively against the piano, a guitar—guitar capable of playing the Spanish fandango by itself, if you give it a start. Frantic work of art on the wall—pious motto, done on the premises, sometimes in colored yarns, sometimes in faded grasses: progenitor of the “God Bless Our Home” of modern commerce. Framed in black moldings on the wall, other works of art, conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sailboat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees on shore, anthracite precipice; name of criminal conspicuous in the corner. Lithograph, Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Lithograph, The Grave at St. Helena. Steel plates, Trumbull’s Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Sally from Gibraltar. Copperplates, Moses Smiting the Rock, and Return of the Prodigal Son. In big gilt frame, slander of the family in oil: papa holding a book (“Constitution of the United States”); guitar leaning against Mama, blue ribbons fluttering from its neck; the young ladies, as children, in slippers and scalloped pantalettes, one embracing toy horse, the other beguiling kitten with ball of yarn, and both simpering up at Mama, who simpers back. These persons all fresh, raw, and red—apparently skinned. Opposite, in gilt frame, grandpa and grandma, at thirty and twenty-two, stiff, old-fashioned, high-collared, puff-sleeved, glaring pallidly out from a background of solid Egyptian night. Under a glass French clock dome, large bouquet of stiff flowers done in corpsy white wax. Pyramidal whatnot in the corner, the shelves occupied chiefly with bric-a-brac of the period, disposed with an eye to best effect: shell, with the Lord’s Prayer carved on it; another shell—of the long-oval sort, narrow, straight orifice, three inches long, running from end to end—portrait of Washington carved on it; not well done; the shell had Washington’s mouth, originally—artist should have built to that. These two are memorials of the long-ago bridal trip to New Orleans and the French Market. Other bric-a-brac: Californian “specimens”—quartz, with gold wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet of ancestral hair in it; Indian arrowheads,