The front room, the parlor, seemed to us children to be a room of much splendor, but was open for general use only on Sunday evening or on rare occasions when there were parties.

The Sunday evening family gathering was the redeeming feature in a day which otherwise we children did not enjoy--chiefly because we were all of us made to wear clean clothes and keep neat.

The ornaments of that parlor I remember now, including the gas chandelier decorated with a great quantity of cut-glass prisms.

These prisms struck me as possessing peculiar magnificence.

One of them fell off one day, and I hastily grabbed it and stowed it away, passing several days of furtive delight in the treasure, a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out and convicted of larceny.