Page:The lady or the tiger and other stories, Stockton (Scribner's 1897 ed).djvu/193

Rh strongly as some of our modern furniture,—such as mine, for instance, which you know well enough is just as strong as any furniture need be,—don't you suppose they would have done it? Of course they would. The trouble about the construction of a chair like that is that it makes your own construction too evident. When I sit in one of them I think I know exactly where my joints are put together, especially those in my back."

Tom seemed particularly to dislike the tiles that were set in many articles of my new furniture. He could not see what was the good of inserting crockery into bedsteads and writing-desks; and as to the old pictures on the tiles, he utterly despised them.

"If the old buffers who made the originals of those pictures," he said, "had known that free and enlightened citizens of the nineteenth century were going to copy them they'd have learned to draw."

However, we didn't mind this talk very much, and we even managed to smile when he made fun and puns and said:

"Well, I suppose people in your station are bound to do this thing, as it certainly is stylish." But there was one thing he said that did trouble us. He came into the house one morning, and remarked:

"I don't want to make you dissatisfied with your new furniture, but it seems to me—and to other people, too, for I've heard them talking about it—that such furniture never can look as it ought to in such a house. In old times, when the people didn't know how to make any better furniture than this, they didn't know how to build decent houses either. They had no