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There she would remain contented for hours, sometimes sitting on his knee, sometimes herself staking a florin or two "to change the luck," M. Linders would say laughingly, sometimes wearied out, curled up fast asleep in a corner of one of the sofas.
To the furniture of this room the widow added one of those commonplace mahogany sofas with the Egyptian heads that Jacob Desmalter manufactured by the gross in 1806, covering them with a silken green stuff bearing a design of white geometric circles. Above this piece of furniture hung a portrait of Bridau, done in pastel by the hand of an amateur, which at once attracted the eye.
The toning of this room, with regard to color, was like that of the room I described in Stafford House the carpet of green ground, with the same little leaf upon it, the walls, chairs, and sofas covered with green damask. The whole air of these rooms was very charming, suggestive of refined taste and domestic habits.
Behold us, then, with our two rooms papered, carpeted, and curtained for two thousand dollars; and now are to be put in them sofas, lounges, étagères, centre-tables, screens, chairs of every pattern and device, for which it is but moderate to allow a thousand more.
Some yawned fearfully; others cursed and swore; others shook their sides with merriment; others reasoned and remonstrated with their neighbors; some very composedly stretched themselves upon the sofas, having first borrowed chair-cushions enough to support their somnolent heads; other bivouacked on three chairs, while some, not finding a convenient couch, stretched themselves flat on the floor of the House, with, perhaps, a volume of the Laws of the United States as their pillow.
Two sofas sat back to back in the centre of the room, and a beautiful little gilt desk on which was the most wonderful of all his clocks, with several large foreign chairs upholstered in plush and velvet, completed the furniture.
We found everything had been raided by the Sofas, who had sacked, burned or destroyed what they were unable to take away. Heaps of cinders marked the sites of former homesteads, the ground was strewn with potsherds, rice and other grain trodden under foot, while our horses moved forward knee deep in ashes.
The walls were rose colored satin, padded and puckered; the voluminous curtains were pale satin, with floods and billows of real lace; the chairs embroidered, the tables all buhl and ormolu, and the sofas felt like little seas. The lady herself, in a delightful peignoir, sat nestled cozily in a sort of ottoman with arms.
Everything in the house was changed, everything was in keeping with its new inhabitants. Beardless servant lads, grinning and full of fun, had replaced the sober old servants of former days. Two setter dogs dashed wildly about and gambolled over the sofas, where the fat Roska had at one time waddled in solemn dignity.
Another voice chimed in now, which was the very embodiment of refined horror. "And you don't have pianos nor sofas, and the room isn't lighted with gas! I'm sure I don't see how we can live! It is not what we have been accustomed to." This was Marion, with the most dancing eyes in the world, and the President completed the scene by laughing outright.
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