Page:Essays in miniature.djvu/178

 174 to stop grumbling and appreciate the change.

When it chances that these familiar details are associated in the mind with pleasures, early pleasures especially, the memory of which lingers with the sweetness of honey, then the pain of parting with them is utterly disproportioned to their worth. I have never been able to understand how people can rebind an old book, or reframe an old picture, if the book or the picture have been in any way dear to them for years. How strange and unfriendly these objects look in their new dress! How remote they seem from the recollections hitherto aroused by their presence! One of the minor grievances of my life is the gradual disappearance from the theatres of all the old drop-curtains I can remember since my childish days. Perhaps the new curtains are better than the old ones—I hear persons say as much occasionally—but to me they are simply hideous, because their native ugliness is unsoftened by any gracious memory of those far-off nights when, feverish with delight, I sat