"Well,for all His mercies,large and small,the Lord be praised!"she cried piously,as she dropped into the big rocking chair."THAT is what I consider escaping by the skin of your teeth!"Then father and Laddie laughed,and said they thought so too.
When the blinds were up,the outside looked well,and you should have seen the inside!The woodwork was enamelled white,and the wall paper was striped in white and silver.Every so far on the silver there was a little pink moss rose having green leaves.
The carpet was plum red and green in wide stripes,and the lace curtains were freshly washed,snowy,and touched the floor.The big rocker,the straight-backed chairs,and the sofa were beautiful red mahogany wood,and the seats shining haircloth.If no one happened to be looking,you could sit on a sofa arm,stick your feet out and shoot off like riding down a haystack;the landing was much better.On the sofa you bounced two feet high the first time;one,the second;and a little way the third.On the haystack,maybe you hit a soft spot,and maybe you struck a rock.Sometimes if you got smart,and tried a new place,and your feet caught in a tangle of weeds and stuck,you came up straight,pitched over,and landed on your head.THEN if you struck a rock,you were still,quite a while.I was once.But you never dared let mother see you--on the sofa,I mean;she didn't care about the haystack.
There were pictures in oval black frames having fancy edges,and a whatnot where all our Christmas and birthday gifts,almost too dainty to handle,were kept.You fairly held your breath when you looked at the nest of spun green glass,with the white dove in it,that George Washington Mitchell gave to Shelley.Of course a dove's nest was never deep,and round,and green,and the bird didn't have red eyes and a black bill.I thought whoever could blow glass as beautifully as that,might just as easy have made it right while he was at it;but anyway,it was pretty.There were pitchers,mugs,and vases,almost too delicate to touch,and the cloth-covered box with braids of hair coiled in wreaths from the heads of the little fever and whooping cough sisters.
Laddie asked Sally if she and Peter were going to have the ceremony performed while they sat on the sofa.Seemed the right place.They had done all their courting there,even on hot summer days;but I supposed that was because Sally didn't want to be seen fixing Peter's tie until she was ready.She made no bones about it then.She fixed it whenever she pleased;likewise he held her hand.Shelley said that was disgusting,and you wouldn't catch her.Leon said he bet a dollar he would;and I said if he knew he'd get beaten as I did,I bet two dollars he wouldn't tell what he saw.The mantel was white,with vases of the lovely grasses that grew beside the stream at the foot of the Big Hill.Mother gathered the fanciest every fall,dried them,and dipped them in melted alum coloured with copperas,aniline,and indigo.Then she took bunches of the colours that went together best and made bouquets for the big vases.They were pretty in the daytime,but at night you could watch them sparkle and shimmer forever.
I always thought the sitting-room was nicer than the parlour.
The woodwork was white enamel there too,but the bureau and chairs were just cherry and not too precious to use.They were every bit as pretty.The mantel was much larger.I could stand up in the fireplace,and it took two men to put on an everyday log,four the Christmas one.On each side were the book shelves above,and the linen closets below.The mantel set between these,and mother always used the biggest,most gorgeous bouquets there,because she had so much room.The hearth was a slab of stone that came far into the room.We could sit on it and crack nuts,roast apples,chestnuts,and warm our cider,then sweep all the muss we made into the fire.The wall paper was white and pale pink in stripes,and on the pink were little handled baskets filled with tiny flowers of different colours.We sewed the rags for the carpet ourselves,and it was the prettiest thing.One stripe was wide,all gray,brown,and dull colours,and the other was pink.There were green blinds and lace curtains here also,and nice braided rugs that all of us worked on of winter evenings.Everything got spicker and spanner each day.
Mother said there was no use in putting down a carpet in a dining-room where you constantly fed a host,and the boys didn't clean their feet as carefully as they should in winter;but there were useful rags where they belonged,and in our bedroom opening from it also.The dining-room wall paper had a broad stripe of rich cream with pink cabbage roses scattered over it and a narrow pink stripe,while the woodwork was something perfectly marvellous.I didn't know what kind of wood it was,but a man who could turn his hand to anything,painted it.First,he put on a pale yellow coat and let it dry.Then he added wood brown,and while it was wet,with a coarse toothed comb,a rag,and his fingers,he imitated the grain,the even wood,and knotholes of dressed lumber,until many a time I found myself staring steadily at a knot to see if a worm wouldn't really come working out.You have to see a thing like that to understand how wonderful it is.
You couldn't see why they washed the bedding,and took the feathers from the pillows and steamed them in mosquito netting bags and dried them in the shade,when Sally's was to be a morning wedding,but they did.I even had to take a bucket and gather from around the walls all the little heaps of rocks and shells that Uncle Abraham had sent mother from California,take them out and wash and wipe them,and stack them back,with the fanciest ones on top.He sent her a ring made of gold he dug himself.She always kept the ring in a bottle in her bureau,and she meant to wear it at the wedding,with her new silk dress.Ihad a new dress too.I don't know how they got everything done.
All of them worked,until the last few days they were perfect cross patches.
