"I stood and stared about me in perfect amazement without speaking for a minute or two, till my grandmother got down from her stool, and my father told me to go to speak to her.
"'Are you going away, grandmother ?' I said at last, my curiosity overcoming my shyness.

'Are these all your clothes?
You will want a great many boxes to pack them in, and what queer ones some of them are!' "'Queer, my dear,' said my grandmother.

'They are certainly not like what you get now-a-days, if that is what you mean by queer.

See here, Nelly, this is your great-grandmother's wedding dress--white Padusoy embroidered in gold--why, child, it would stand alone! And this salmon-coloured satin, with the pea-green slip--will the stuffs they dye now keep their colour like that a hundred years hence ?' "'It's good strong stuff certainly,' said my father, touching it as he spoke.

But then he went on to say to my grandmother that the days for such things were past.