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Updated: June 22, 2025
Peedles had one dress and one cap, both black and void of ostentation; but on Sundays and holidays she would appear metamorphosed. She had carefully preserved the bulk of her stage wardrobe, even to the paste-decked shoes and tinsel jewelry.
She wore a white gown, as on the night of the ball; but her whole costume was much less rich and shockingly immodest. The dress was barely caught together at the shoulders; her hair floated in a blond mist low over her eyes, and around her neck was a necklace of pearls too large to be real, alternated with bits of tinsel. Delobelle was right: the Bohemian life was better suited to her.
Long rows of booths, brilliant with tinsel and gauds, exposed to view clusters of balls, masks strung by the eyes, tin toys, trains, carts, mechanical horses, carriages, steam-engines with diminutive boilers, Lilliputian tableware of porcelain, pine Nativities, dolls both foreign and domestic, the former red and smiling, the latter sad and pensive like little ladies beside gigantic children.
And as I gaze, a sense of something shoddy oppresses me, of tinsel and glitter and flamboyance: a feeling that here is no true greatness, no sphinx-like sublimity. A shadow of the world and the flesh falls across the brooding figure, a Napoleonic vulgarity coarsens the features, there is a Mephistophelian wrinkle in the corner of the lips.
Tossed to and fro upon the tide of life, who has not sometimes listened to the wrangling voices which shouted, "Mystical Interpretation," "Absolute Fiction," "Huge Conglomerate of Myths"? Whose eye has never been caught by the sparkling tinsel of modern philosophies, with their Seers, Heroes, Missions, Developments, Insights, Principles of Nature, Clairvoyance, and Magnetic Currents?
The old tools were arranged in the same lines as they had been for centuries the punches, the awls, the mallets, and the hammers; on the work-frame the little donkey waste-basket and the tinsel, the thimbles and the needles, moved up and down as usual, while in the different corners, where they ended by growing rusty, the diligent, the hand spinning-wheel, and the reel for winding, seemed to sleep in the peaceful quiet which entered through the open window.
All alike have thatched porches, sanded paths, transparencies lighted with petroleum lamps, tinsel stars, summerhouses, arrangements for open-air illumination and highly colored advertisements, in which are set forth all the component elements of a "ROBINSON," such as shooting-galleries, bowling-alleys, swings, private arbors, Munich beer, and dinner in a tree.
From this junction of vulgar ideas with the ambitious expressions of the tribune sprung that strange language in which the fragments of thought are mingled with the tinsel of words, and thus the popular eloquence of the period resembles the ill-combined display at an extravagant parvenu.
Her eyes had been so long accustomed to the glitter and tinsel of circus fineries that she saw nothing unusual in a picture that might have held a painter spellbound. Circling the inside of the tent and forming a double line down the centre were partially unpacked trunks belching forth impudent masses of satins, laces, artificial hair, paper flowers, and paste jewels.
The absence of such merely nominal titles excites in us no deep regret; there is in them little that is monumental, and the pretty tinsel, with which they gild monuments already based on substantial worth, is easily, and without a sigh, exchanged for that everlasting sunshine reflected from the loving remembrances of human hearts.
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