I knew, the first morning Mrs. Potiphar spoke of the new house, that it must be built; but I determined to make little occasional stands against it: so one day I said, "Polly, do you know that the wives of all the noblemen live in the same houses in London and Paris, and Rome and Vienna, where their fathers and mothers lived before them? Did that ever occur to you, my dear ? ”

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Why, Mr. Potiphar," she replied, "do you mean to follow the example of foreign noblemen? I thought you always laughed at me for what you call 'aping."""So I do, and so I will continue to do, Mrs. Potiphar. I only thought that, perhaps, you would like to know the fact, because it would make you more contented with our old house here. It has an aristocratic precedent."

not take as I Well, here I am,

Poor, dear little Mrs. Potiphar! It did meant it should, and so I said no more. master of a great house, worth a good fortune, respected down town, and husband to Mrs. Potiphar.

This house cost me seventy-two thousand dollars. This is my house, and Mrs. Potiphar and myself stay here. It is superbly furnished; Mrs. Potiphar and I don't know much about such things; she was determined to have the house furnished in Parisian style.

So we delivered it into the hands of certain eminent upholsterers to be furnished, just as we send one of our children to the tailor to be clothed. To be sure, I asked what proof we had that the upholsterer was possessed of taste, but Mrs. P. silenced me by saying that it was his business to have taste, and that a man who sold furniture naturally knew what was handsome and proper for my house.

The furnishing was certainly performed with great splendor and expense. My drawing rooms strongly resemble one of the departments in the World's Fair. Every kind of chair, sofa, and table, that whim might fancy, was crowded into these rooms. There are curtains like rainbows, and carpets appearing as if the curtains had dripped all over the floor.

There are heavy cabinets of carved walnut, such as belong in the heavy wainscoted rooms of old palaces, set against my last French pattern of wall paper. There are lofty chairs, like the thrones of archbishops in Gothic cathedrals, standing by the side of elaborately gilded, framed mirrors.

Marble statues of Venus and Apollo support my mantels, upon which ormolu French clocks ring the hours. In all possible places there are statues and vases. In truth my house is a large curiosity shop of valuable articles, costly articles I mean, clustered without taste.

no,

They are there because my house was large enough, and I was able to buy them; because, as Mrs. P. says, one must do as well as one's neighbors, and show that one is rich, if he is so. They are there, in fact, because I could not help it. I did not want them; but then I don't know what I did want.

Somehow, I don't feel as if I had any home, merely because orders were given to the best upholsterers and fancy men in town to send samples of all wares to my house. To pay a morning call at Mrs. Potiphar's is, in some respects, better than going shopping. You may see more new and costly things in a shorter time. People say, "What a love of a table!" "What a darling chair!" "O, what a splendid sofa!" and they all go and tease their husbands to get things precisely like them.

When Kurz Pacha, the Sennaar minister, came to a dinner at my house, he said, "Bless my soul! Mr. Potiphar, your house is just like your neighbor's."

"I know it; I am perfectly aware of that; there is no more difference between my house and Croesus's, than there is between two ten dollar bills of the same bank. He might live in my house, and I in his, without either of us finding it out. He has the same sort, kind, and description of curtains, carpets, Venuses, Apollos, busts, vases, and paintings as I have. We have each got to refurnish every

year or two with other grotesque and ormolu things, and he goes into his rooms, and thinks the whole a vexatious bore, just as I do."

THE SAME, CONCLUDED.

Now, unfortunately, Kurz Pacha particularly disliked precisely what Mrs. Potiphar most liked, because it was the fashion to like them. I mean the Louis Fourteenth and the Louis Fifteenth things.

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"Taste, dear Mrs. Potiphar," said the pacha, was a thing not known in the days of those kings. Grace was entirely supplanted by grotesqueness; and now, instead of pure and beautiful Greek forms, we must collect these hideous things. If you are going backward to find models, why not go as far as good ones? Why, my dear madam, an ormolu French clock of Louis Fourteenth's time would have given Pericles a fit.

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Why pitch every century, country, and fashion, indiscriminately, into your parlors and drawing room? Things are not beautiful because they cost money, nor is any grouping handsome without harmony. Your house is like a woman dressed in a French bodice, with a Queen Anne's hooped skirt, wearing an Elizabethan ruff round her neck, a Druse's horn on her head, and limping in Chinese shoes. My dear madam, this is the kind of thing we go to see in It is the old stock joke of the world."

museums.

By Jove! how mad Mrs. Potiphar was! She rose from the table, to the great dismay of Kurz Pacha, and I could only restrain her by reminding her that the Sennaar minister had but an imperfect idea of our language, and that in Sennaar, people probably said what they thought when they conversed.

"You'd better go to Sennaar, then, yourself, Mr. Potiphar,"

said my wife, as she smoothed her rumpled feathers. "'Pon my word, madam, it is my own opinion," replied I.

Kurz Pacha, who is a philosopher of the Sennaar school, asks me if people have no ideas of their own in building houses. I answer, "None, that I know of, except that of getting the house built."

The fact is, it is as much as I can do, to make money to build a house and keep it going. There are a great many fine statues in my house, but I know nothing about them, I don't see why we should have such heathen images in respectable houses.

But Mrs. P. says, "Pooh! have you no love for the fine

arts? "

There it is; it does not do not to love the fine arts. So Polly is continually cluttering up the halls and staircases with models, and sending me heavy bills for the same.

When the house was ready, and my wife had purchased the furniture, she came and said to me, "Now, my dear P., there is one thing we have not thought of." "Well,

what is that? "Pictures, you know,

"What in the world do you want pictures for?" growled I, rather surlily, I am afraid.

"Why, to furnish the walls; what do you suppose we want pictures for, my dear?"

"I tell you what, Polly," said I," pictures are the most extravagant kind of furniture. Pshaw! a man rubs and dabbles a little upon a canvas two feet square, and then only asks three hundred dollars for it."

"Dear me, Pot.," she answered, "I don't want home-made pictures. What an idea! Do you think I would have pictures that were painted in this country hung up on my walls? No, that I won't. Let us have some choice specimens of the old masters; a landscape by Rayfel,* for instance; or one of Angel's finest pieces, or a Madonna of Geddo's."

What was the use of fighting against such a thing? I told her to have her own way. So Mrs. P. consulted Singe, the pastry cook, who told her his cousin had just come out from Italy with a lot of the very finest pictures in the world, which he had bribed one of the pope's guard to steal from the Vatican, and which he would sell at a bargain.

They hang on my walls now. They represent nothing in particular; but in certain lights, if you look very closely, you can recognize something that looks like a lump of something brown. There is one very ugly woman, with a convulsive child in her arms, to which Mrs. P. directly takes all her visitors, and asks them to admire the beautiful Shay douver of Geddo.*

When I go out to dinner with people that converse about pictures and books, I don't like to seem behind, so I say, in a critical way, that Geddo was a good painter. None of them contradict me. One day, when somebody asked me "Which of his pictures do you prefer?" I answered, straight, "His Shay douver;" and no more questions were asked.

The Geddo is in

They hang all about my house now. the dining-room. I asked my friend, the Sennaar minister, if it was not rather odd to have a religious picture in the dining-room. He smiled, and said it was perfectly right and proper if I liked it, and if such an ugly picture did not take away my appetite.

"What difference does it make," said he in the Sennaar manner: "it would be equally out of keeping with every other room in your house. My dear Potiphar," said he, "it is a perfectly unprincipled house, this of yours. It is overloaded with an ill-assorted, confused jumble of things that don't belong together.

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Why do you barricade yourself behind all these things that you cannot enjoy, and do not understand. If you

*Chef d'œuvre.