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A glittering rapier, with its embossed and jewelled scabbard, hung by his side. The common people in New Netherland, would no more think of assuming the dress of a gentleman or lady, than with us, a merchant or mechanic would think of decorating himself in the dress of a Major-General in the United States army. There was an impassable gulf between the peasantry and the aristocracy.

In a palace inhabited by Sargon at Nimrud, and in close juxtaposition with a monument certainly of his time, were discovered by Mr. Layard a number of dishes, plates, and bowls, embossed with great taste and skill, which are among the most elegant specimens of Assyrian art discovered during the recent researches.

Miss Sullivan could not spell out in my hand all that the books required, and it was very difficult to have textbooks embossed in time to be of use to me, although my friends in London and Philadelphia were willing to hasten the work. For a while, indeed, I had to copy my Latin in braille, so that I could recite with the other girls.

There was the saddlery bazar, where one could buy magnificent trappings for one's Arab steeds, saddle-cloths embossed with gold, bridles of scarlet silk, a single rein which makes you look as if you were managing a horse by a single thread, and bridles of silver and ivory. There was a shoemaker's bazar. How different from a shoe shop in England!

Jacques I bequeath to him my large volume of love-songs in manuscript, begging him to read them for his interest and instruction, and never, under any circumstances, to copy them upon embossed paper and send them to his lady-love, pretending that they are original, as I have known many forlorn lovers to do before this.

The strangest and ugliest old crockery, pictured over with monstrosities, the Palissy ware, embossed with vegetables, fishes, lobsters, that look absolutely real; the delicate Sevres china, each piece made inestimable by pictures from a master's hand; in short, it is a despair and misery to see so much that is curious and beautiful, and to feel that far the greater portion of it will slip out of the memory, and be as if we had never seen it.

The parchment was often worn through at the angles, but there was no breakage from shrinking, the material having been shrunken as much as possible when prepared from the skin. At Harvard College I examined an embossed calf binding stretched on wooden sides which was above a hundred years old. It was in almost perfect preservation, and not much shrunken.

In the candle-light, she had sat on the edge of her bed there was no other furniture in the room with one of Kirk's books on her knee. Looking at the dots embossed on the paper conveyed nothing to her; she shut her eyes, and felt the page with a forefinger which immediately seemed to her as large as a biscuit.

This is so rarely done, at least successfully, that one need not live a very long life to see most of the rich families he knew in childhood more or less reduced, and the millions shifted into the hands of the country-boys who were sweeping stores and carrying parcels when the now decayed gentry were driving their chariots, eating their venison over silver chafing-dishes, drinking Madeira chilled in embossed coolers, wearing their hair in powder, and casing their legs in long boots with silken tassels.

The rich sought after a lavish profusion of silver goblets studded with jewels and sometimes ventured on a cup of gold, although the use of a full gold service was by imperial ordinance restricted to the palace. There were drinking vessels, broad and shallow with richly embossed or repoussé work, or deep with double handles and a foot, or otherwise diversified.