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We do not all carry our anger so far as did a little three-year-old maiden I heard of, who, on tripping over the rockers of her chair, promptly picked herself up, and carrying the chair to a closet, pushed it in and spitefully shut the door on it, leaving it alone in the dark to repent its wrong-doing. Our blind, unreasoning animal anger is excited by whatever opposes or baffles us.
Evadne looked round the room with its soft curtains swaying in the breeze, the cool matting on the floor with a rug or two, the light bookcases with their wealth of thought, the comfortable wicker rockers, the bamboo tables holding several half cut magazines, an open work-basket, a vase with a single rose, while on the low mantel a cluster of graceful lilies were reflected in the mirror.
The great manufacturers of the country, and the heavy contributing agents, on learning our intentions, sent, without a hint from us, many of their articles, as, for instance, New Bedford, Mass., sent mattresses and bedding; Sheboygan, Wis., sent furniture and enameled ironware; Titusville, Pa., with a population of ten thousand, sent ten thousand dollars' worth of its well-made bedsteads, springs, extension-tables, chairs, stands and rockers; and the well-known New York newspaper, The Mail and Express, sent a large lot of mattresses, feather pillows, bedclothing, sheets, and pillow-slips by the thousand and cooking utensils by the ten thousands.
Thick dust lay on the saddle, on the rockers, and on the stiffly stretched-out tail, from which most of the red paint had been worn away. It was evidently a long time since any little boy had mounted there, chirruped to the horse, and ridden gloriously away, pursuing a fairy fox through imaginary fields. The eye of the wooden horse was glazed and dim.
There were two rockers, besides one easy-chair, covered with old-gold plush also an extravagance. There was a really beautiful old mahogany table with carved base, of which neither Henry nor Sylvia thought much. Sylvia meditated selling enough Calkin's soap to buy a new one, and stow that away in Mr. Allen's room. Mr. Allen professed great admiration for it, to her wonderment.
In the parlor there was light enough from the front door to show him the long formal room with its white marble centre-table adorned with a few gilt-topped books and a spindly lamp, the square piano, the stiff-looking chairs and rockers, the few pictures against the faded gold paper, the white mantel, set with shells and vases and a few photographs, the quaint curving-backed sofa between the side windows.
There was scarcely any crockery, pewter and tin being its substitutes; and as for chairs there was only one, and that had rockers: a practice of New England that has gradually diffused itself over the whole country, looking down ridicule, the drilling of boarding-schools, the comments of elderly ladies of the old school, the sneers of nurses, and, in a word, all that venerable ideas of decorum could suggest, until this appliance of domestic ease has not only fairly planted itself in nearly every American dwelling, but in a good many of Europe also!
In the commodious kitchen of Eleanor's former home two old people were sitting in calico valanced rockers, one by either window. The house was a pleasant old colonial structure, now badly run down but still marked with that distinction that only the instincts of aristocracy can bestow upon a decaying habitation.
It is not a ticking bag of baked feathers enclosed in a dainty, spotless case of white linen, but a little upright piece of wood, six inches high and long, and one wide, rounded at the bottom like the rockers of a cradle. On the top, lying in a groove, is a tiny rounded bag of calico filled with rice-chaff, about the size of a sausage.
I made Olga hold it up at the foot of the bed so I could see it better. It had been scroll-sawed and sand-papered and polished like any factory-made baby-bed, and my faithful old Olie had even attempted some hand-carving along the rockers and the head-board. But as I looked at it I realized that it must have taken weeks and weeks to make.
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