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Like Flaubert, he excelled in composing a story, in distributing the facts with subtle gradation, in bringing in at the end of a familiar dialogue something startlingly dramatic; but such composition, with him, seems easy, and while the descriptions are marvelously well established in his stories, the reverse is true of Flaubert's, which always appear a little veneered.

I have seen Germans take out their false teeth at the table d'hôte and rinse them in a glass of water, but it remains for Naples to cap the climax for Sunday-afternoon diversions. A curious thing about European decency is that it seems to be forced on people by law, and indulged in only for show. The Gallic nations are only veneered with decency.

Unluckily, I did not excel as a cabinet-maker, though I managed to finish tolerable boxes; but my mother had two made by the more skilful hands of Ludo, which were provided with locks and hinges, so neatly finished, veneered, and polished that many a trained cabinet-maker's apprentice could have done no better.

They know nothing of what they are going to meet, nothing of what they will have to do; Religion and the Ratepayer and the Rights of the Parent working through the instrumentality of the Best Club in the World have kept their souls and minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered, with the thinnest sham of training or knowledge.

Walnut, chestnut, ebony, and some mahogany were used. Some of the furniture was veneered, and there was a great deal of gilding used and also much painted furniture. The ormolu mounts were most elaborate, curved and ornate like the carving, and were used wherever possible. The brocades used for furniture coverings were lovely in color and design.

"Sure he has," Feinstein replied nonchalantly, scratching a parlor match on the veneered shelf under the cashier's window. The first attempt missed fire, and again he drew a match across the lower part of the partition, leaving a great scar on its polished surface. "Ain't you afraid you spoil them fixtures?" Abe asked.

"Pretty well!" he said; "not so much fallen off as I expected." Then he set up his bolster in a very knowing sort of way, and delivered two or three blows straight as rulers and swift as winks. "That will do," he said. Then, as if determined to make a certainty of his condition, he took a dynamometer from one of the drawers in his old veneered bureau. First he squeezed it with his two hands.

One might indeed have sung of this little red violin that looked to Lyddy, in the sunset glow, as if it were veneered with rubies all that Shelley sang of another perfect instrument: "The artist who this viol wrought To echo all harmonious thought, Fell'd a tree, while on the steep The woods were in their winter sleep, Rock'd in that repose divine Of the wind-swept Apennine; And dreaming, some of Autumn past, And some of Spring approaching fast, And some of April buds and showers, And some of songs in July bowers, And all of love; and so this tree O that such our death may be! Died in sleep, and felt no pain, To live in happier form again."

Of course there is ever and ever so much more to be said about it, and the present writer is not at all weary; but he hears his reader's clock telling the hour and feels very sure it is correct. Often one's hands are too heavily veneered with garden loam for him to go to his books to verify a quotation.

Then all that was mean and despicable in his thinly veneered nature came to the surface, and, springing forward with an oath, he was about to push her aside, when, without the moving of a finger on her part, he reeled back, recovered himself, caught at a chair, missed it, and fell heavily to the floor.