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There were two old chairs, an embroidered stool, a china vase, a cabinet, a table, and the spinnet. Strangely the furniture looked on the sanded floor, but never was the spiciest present from India more grateful to its receiver than these were to the eyes of Sarah Bond. She felt as if a ban was removed from her when she looked upon the old things so valued by her father.
You are as dull as a Dutch doll, sitting there and saying nothing. I would that Frederick were at home! He can speak when he is spoken to; but you are like a deaf mute!" "I beg your pardon, ma'am. I was reading I did not hear." "That is always the way reading, reading, reading! Why, what good do you think reading will do you? Why don't you get your silk embroidery or practise upon the spinnet?
Sacred, and by me, never-to-be violated, Secrets of Poverty! Should I disclose your honest aims at grandeur, your make-shift efforts of magnificence? Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be extant; thrummed by a thousand ancestral thumbs; dear, cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa! Without mention of mine, be dumb, thou thin accompanier of her thinner warble!
It was a fresh light on Charlotte and on her curious world-quality, of which, in Rome, he had had his due sense, but which clearly would show larger on the big London stage. Rome was, in comparison, a village, a family-party, a little old-world spinnet for the fingers of one hand.
One of the expedients of well-born Huguenot refugees had been tuition, and Madame d'Elmar had made here boarding-school so popular and fashionable that a second generation still maintained its fame, and damsels of the highest rank were sent there to learn French, to play the spinnet, to embroider, to dance, and to get into a carriage with grace.
Then there was in the drawing-room an old spinnet, sadly out of tune, on which she would yet, in spite of the occasional jar and shudder of respondent nerves, now and then play at a sitting all the little music she had learned, and with whose help she had sometimes even tried to find out an air for words that had taken her fancy.
Living is very cheap in Venice; we gave a little money to the mother, and provided for the subsistence of her daughter. She had a voice, and to procure her some resource we gave her a spinnet, and a singing master.
And while the others talked she examined, with unconcealed interest, the queer heavy furniture, the colored prints on the walls and the old spinnet in the corner. Billy was already taking down the guns and Alice sat rocking the doll. Keineth was shown the picture of the great-great-grandmother who had held the arch and was told the story; she saw the plates and the cup and the broken knife.
Jewkes came up, and wanted me sadly to sing her a psalm, as she had often on common days importuned me for a song upon the spinnet: but I declined it, because my spirits were so low I could hardly speak, nor cared to be spoken to; but when she was gone, I remembering the cxxxviith psalm to be a little touching, turned to it, and took the liberty to alter it, somewhat nearer to my case.
We bought or borrowed books, and read them together, we learned to make Holland lace, studied Dutch cookery, and Annora, by Eustace's wish, took lessons on the lute and spinnet, her education in those matters having been untimely cut short.
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