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While she was preparing a venison steak and some coffee, I took a survey of the room, which was certainly ornamented in a very artistical manner. The sofa was covered with little scraps of white net-work; the bureau was dotted all over with little angels made of gauze, highly-colored pin-cushions, and fanciful paper boxes and card-stands.
Goodriche furnished the pin-cushions and the housewife, and gave out the two pieces of chintz for the dolls' frocks; and so busy were the old lady and the little girls, that it was time to lay the cloth for dinner before the things were quite put away. Whilst all this business was going on, Bessy was somewhere about in the garden.
And she pointed to a case of babyish ornaments, pin-cushions, and artificial flowers. "How very strange," said Olive, "to think that the interests and duties of a woman's life should sink down into such trifles as these. I wonder if the nuns are happy?" "Stay and judge, for here comes one, my chief friend here, Sister Ignatia."
They are Indians, a handful of Mohawks and Iroquois, whom some ill wind has blown down from their Canadian reservation, and left in these West Side tenements to eke out such a living as they can, weaving mats and baskets, and threading glass pearls on slippers and pin-cushions, until, one after another, they have died off and gone to happier hunting-grounds than Thompson Street.
"Fannie Mears has a dozen pin-cushions to make and she made twelve of us promise to take one and finish it for the fancy-work table; and then she wouldn't help iron the napkins for the cake plates. She said it wasn't her table and she didn't intend to waste her time.
The hum of comment deepened into surprise, that half stopped and then intensified the giggle. I was puzzled for a minute, and then the direction of their glances, and their remarks explained it all. At the rear of the lower part of the cavalry jacket, about where the upper ornamental buttons are on the tail of a frock coat, are two funny tabs, about the size of small pin-cushions.
The bearded moss clustered like a thousand little brown pin-cushions upon the old thatch, and older stones; and sometimes the polyanthus and primrose, planted beside it by some child who loved to look at flowers, would close their eyes and lay their dewy checks upon the moss's breast at evening.
There was a time when Pauline would have been highly delighted with these gifts, but that time was not now. She felt the impossible tidies, the ugly pin-cushions, the hideous toilet-covers, the grotesque night-dress bags to be more burdens than treasures. What could she possibly do with them? The gold chain and locket were another matter.
These are doing just what the English women did, telling the story of the colored man's wrongs, praying for his deliverance, and presenting his kneeling image constantly before the public eye on bags and needle-books, card-racks, pen-wipers, pin-cushions, &c. Even the children of the north are inscribing on their handy work, "May the points of our needles prick the slaveholder's conscience."
They missed the simple dignity of the blanching Indian maids, who used to squat about on the grass, with their laps full of moccasins and pin-cushions. But, as of old, the photographer came out of his saloon, and invited them to pose for a family group; representing that the light and the spray were singularly propitious, and that everything in nature invited them to be taken.
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