Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/241

 Rh multiplicity of materials which seem to have lain scattered around the domestic hearth a hundred years ago. There is a famous old receipt for "silvering paper without silver," a process designed to be economical, but which requires so many messy and alien ingredients, like "Indian glue," and "Muscovy talc," and "Venice turpentine," and "Japan size," and "Chinese varnish," that mere silver seems by comparison a cheap and common thing. Young ladies whose thrift equalled their ingenuity made their own varnish by boiling isinglass in a quart of brandy,—a lamentable waste of supplies.

Genteel parcels were always wrapped in silver paper. We remember how Miss Edgeworth's Rosamond tries in vain to make one sheet cover the famous "filigree basket," which was her birthday present to her Cousin Bell, and which pointed its own moral by falling to pieces before it was presented. Rosamond's father derides this basket because he is implored not to grasp it by its myrtle-wreathed handle. "But what is the use of the handle," he asks, in the conclusive, irritating fashion of