their heads, and refuse to come out or be interviewed on any terms whatever. And you will agree with me, I think, when I submit that the eighth wonder of the world is a man who can take two sheets of limp, wet paper, eighteen inches wide by ten feet long, and paste them side by side and edge to edge with such astounding ingenuity that you can have no more hope of perceiving the line of division at a distance of five feet than of discovering the boundary between New York and New Jersey by paddling about in the middle of the Hudson River.
In this philosophical attitude of mind, then, I emerged at length from the maelstrom of plastering, carpentry, painting and paper- hanging, and found myself in a position to furnish. As I look back upon this stage it seems to me to have been characterized by a vast superfluity of what Mr. Longfellow very truthfully called “the strange device, excelsior.” Excelsior is to shavings what spaghetti
