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I saw in the nicely swept floor, the clean bed-spreads, and the general neatness of the place, the character of Wilson Edge's wife. "Hog and hominy's our food here in the piny woods," said Mr. Edge, as his wife invited us to the little table; "and we've a few eggs now and then to eat with sweet potatoes, but it's up-hill work to keep the niggers from killing every fowl and animal we have.
Bel Bree lived in New Hampshire; fifteen miles from a railway; in the curious region where the old times and the new touch each other and mix up; where the women use towels, and table-cloths, and bed-spreads, of their mothers' own hand-weaving, and hem their new ones with sewing-machines brought by travelling agents to their doors; where the men mow and rake their fields with modern inventions, but only get their newspapers once a week; where the "help" are neighbors' girls, who wear overskirts and high hats, and sit at the table with the family; where there are rag carpets and "painted chamber-sets;" where they feed calves and young turkeys, and string apples to dry in the summer, and make wonderful patchwork quilts, and wax flowers, and worsted work, perhaps, in the long winters; where they go to church and to sewing societies from miles about, over tremendous hills and pitches, with happy-go-lucky wagons and harnesses that never come to grief; where they have few schools and intermitted teaching, yet turn out, somehow, young men who work their way into professions, and girls who take the world by instinct, and understand a great deal perfectly well that is beyond their practical reach; where the old Puritan stiffness keeps them straight, but gets leavened in some marvelous way with the broader and more generous thought of the time, and wears a geniality that it is half unconscious of; the region where, if you are lucky enough to get into it to know it, you find yourself, as Miss Euphrasia said, encouraged and put in heart again about the world.
The Pratts had only contributed two "bed-spreads," and a "sheet-sham," and a set of antimacassars. If the reader wishes to know what "bed-spreads" and "sheet-shams" are, let him ask his intended, and let him see to it that he marries a woman who cannot tell him. Mrs. Pratt had bought the antimacassars for the Towers, and secretly adored them until Ada pronounced them to be vulgar.
The inclosure was formed by blankets and bed-spreads, which, by reason of their antiquity, had been pensioned off to an undisturbed old age in the garret, not common blankets or bed-spreads, either, bought, as you buy yours, out of a shop, spun or woven by machinery, without individuality or history. Every one of these curtains had its story.
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