Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 22, 2025
At half-past eight Maria stopped abruptly in the middle of her run, and Nurse took me down to the school-room for breakfast. The school-room was high and narrow, with a very old carpet, and a very old piano, some books, two globes, and a good deal of feminine rubbish in the way of old work-baskets, unfinished sewing, etc.
'We will do our best, ma'am, answered the girls heartily, and trooped away with their work-baskets, feeling that though they might never be Harriet Martineaus, Elizabeth Brownings, or George Eliots, they might become noble, useful, and independent women, and earn for themselves some sweet title from the grateful lips of the poor, better than any a queen could bestow.
There was no bureau, nothing; not a nook or corner where a thing might be stowed. I gazed at the motley collection of bed-linen, dust-pans, silver bottles, boot jacks, saddles, old uniforms, full dress military hats, sword-belts, riding-boots, cut glass, window-shades, lamps, work-baskets, and books, and I gave it up in despair. You see, I was not an army girl, and I did not know how to manage.
Theory is combined with practise, and many a fanciful thought is woven in with the reed and raffia of the Indian baskets, African purses, belts, and pine-needle work-baskets. The shuck hats and foot-mats are so foreign in design that one often wonders how it were possible to utilize the same material in so widely different purposes.
There was an "office" also, where these things were for sale to any one who should choose to buy, and great consultations took place among the children, who had almost all brought a little shopping money. Some chose maple-sugar, some, silk-winders, some, little cakes of white wax for use in work-baskets.
Its spotlessly neat and orderly condition was one token; but there were signs of business. Work-baskets, with what seemed fulness of work, were about the room; books, not in great numbers, but lying in little business piles, with business covers and the marks of use. Papers were on one table by the window, with pen and ink and pencil and cards.
If a corner can be appropriated to evening leisure where there is room for a small, brightly covered table, a lamp, a couple of rocking-chairs, work-baskets and a book or magazine, it answers in a small way to the family evening-room, where all gather for rest and comfort.
In a dream, Iskender, at his mother's side, approached once more the Mission on the sandhills, traversed the garden and the clean cool hall, and entered the reception-room with its soft carpets, polished chairs and tables, which had presented to his childish mind the life of palaces. There sat the ladies with their work-baskets, each in her special chair, exactly as of yore.
One fault which you must contract, and which you must never correct, will consist in a sort of heedless curiosity, which will make you examine unceasingly all the boxes, and turn upside down the contents of all dressing-cases and work-baskets.
I discerned to-day that Jenny had surreptitiously appropriated one of the drawers of my study-table to knitting-needles and worsted; and wicker work-baskets and stands of various heights and sizes seem to be planted here and there for permanence among the bookcases.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking