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I never knew but one fat person to appreciate poetry and he crocheted tidies. By the way I have learned to knit!! You see there are so many times when I have to play the gracious hostess when I feel like a volcano within, that I decided to get something on which I could vent my restlessness. It is astonishing how much bad temper one can knit into a garment.
A pleasant, homelike picture. Nothing remarkable in the way of setting; the room, with its stuffed chairs, its tidies, and cabinet organ, was only unlike other such rooms from the fact that Mother Golden habitually sat in it; she could keep even haircloth from being commonplace. But now, all the light in the room seemed to centre on the yellow flossy curls against her breast.
Much red and white drapery gave the sanctuary the appearance of a gay drawing-room, and the profane Lavinia compared the officiating clergy to a set of red furniture. The biggest priest was the sofa, four deacons the arm-chairs, and three little boys the foot-stools, all upholstered in crimson silk, and neatly covered with lace tidies.
Grandma liked to talk as much as grandpa liked to keep silent; and always, to the running accompaniment of her tongue, she kept her hands busied, whether "puttering about" in her house or flower-garden, or crocheting "tidies," or knitting little mittens, or creating the multi-coloured paper-flowers which helped make her house so alluring.
"'Well, then, says I, 'you poor, contaminated adjunct of a sprinkling-pot and degraded household pet, what did you go and do it for? Look at you, all decent and unriotous, and only fit to sit on juries and mend the wood-house door. You was a man once. I have hostility for all such acts. Why don't you go in the house and count the tidies or set the clock, and not stand out here in the atmosphere?
"Well, afther they have larned in school what they ar-re licked f'r larnin' in th' back yard that is squashin' mud with their hands they're conducted up through a channel iv free an' beautiful thought till they're r-ready f'r colledge. Mamma packs a few doylies an' tidies into son's bag, an' some silver to be used in case iv throuble with th' landlord, an' th' la-ad throts off to th' siminary.
The storm-ridden trees lashed the bare dripping windows. The carpet was threadbare. White crocheted tidies lent their emphasis to the hideous black furniture. A table, with marble top, like a graveyard slab, stood in the middle of the room. On it was a bunch of wax flowers in a glass case. On the white plastered walls hung family photographs in narrow gilt frames.
Jacks and I were regular boarders at the restaurant, of course. The front room of the Hinkle House was as neat a little parlor as there was in the black-waxy country. It was all willow rocking-chairs, and home-knit tidies, and albums, and conch shells in a row. And a little upright piano in one corner.
There was an ingrain carpet on the floor of a green groundwork with pale-yellow flowers on it, of a genus known to no botanist. The tidies on the chair backs were so stiff with starch that it would be a punishment to lay one's head against them. On a little marble-topped table between the windows was something made of shells and seaweed in a glass-topped case.
Yet he never heard her plead poverty or preach economy. In spite of the absence of protecting rugs and tidies, however, and in spite of the fact that she plainly conducted her life and household along the lines of the greatest possible comfort, he saw many evidences that she counted the pennies and that she made every penny count.
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