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"Couldn't you have transplanted it?" asked Jane, sympathetically. "I went back the very next day after we moved out, with a peach-basket and a fire-shovel. But my poor bush was buried under seven feet of yellow sand. To-day there's seven stories of brick and mortar. So all I've got from the old place is just this furniture of ma's and the wall-paper." "The wall-paper?"

Her log house was the largest in the country, barring Captain Jones's, her nearest neighbour, ten miles up at Jackson's Lake, and his was a hotel. Hers could boast of six rooms and two clothes' closets. The ceilings were white muslin to shut off the rafters, the sitting room had wall-paper and a rag carpet, and in one corner was the post-office.

It blooms, a dry, woollen, papery, cast-iron garden. The floor flourishes with blossoms adust, poorly conventionalised into a kind of order; the table-cover is ablaze with a more realistic florescence; the wall-paper is set with bunches; the rigid machine-lace curtain is all of roses and lilies in its very construction, over the muslin blinds an impotent sprig is scattered.

When he went to sleep, it was with the lights turned on in his bedroom; partly because of his old timidity, and partly so that, if he should wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, no horrible suspicion of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington and Calvin above his bed. On Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound.

The house was simply furnished, and the country people were charmed with the gay chintz and bright wall-paper, the brick fireplace, and the general appropriateness of it all. As it was not large, tents were put up for the family and guests to sleep in.

A lovely country, too, full of great elms and velvet meadows. This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.

He examined the portraits and the little fancy pictures, of slight merit but gaudily framed, that covered the green wall-paper almost to the ceiling. And in a kind of analytical way he reflected that these portraits, these little paintings, these pretty, frivolous furnishings were the aftermath of all the mercenary love-affairs which had taken place here in this apartment.

Yet he knew perfectly well that he had not been really asleep; a little effort recalled a constant impression of the wall-paper, with its pink flowers on a buff ground, and of the muslin-curtained window, letting in the grey winter light. He had been some seven months in London when this odd experience first occurred to him.

And there was the streak in the wall-paper caused one night by the rain leaking through the roof.

The sitting-room had been partly modernized by the late Mme. Sechard; the walls were adorned with a wainscot, fearful to behold, painted the color of powder blue. The panels were decorated with wall-paper Oriental scenes in sepia tint and for all furniture, half-a-dozen chairs with lyre-shaped backs and blue leather cushions were ranged round the room.