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Updated: August 24, 2024
The cabinet-organ setting "catty-cornered" beside the roller-towel indicated the presence of womankind, and it indicated correctly, for out in the kitchen was Mrs. Alonzo Snow, and elsewhere about the hotel were her two lovely daughters, the Misses Violet and Rosie Snow, facetiously known as "the Snowbirds."
During the six weeks of her life in Canaan, she had never once seen in this or any other household the least sign of any toilet appointments, except a tin basin at the pump, a roller-towel on the porch, and a small mirror in the kitchen. Tooth-brushes, she had learned, were almost unknown in the neighborhood, nearly every one of more than seventeen years wearing "store-teeth."
The plaster, discolored by the steam of many wash-days, was crisscrossed with cracks from the big earthquake of the previous spring. The floor was ridged, wide-cracked, and uneven, and in front of the stove it was worn through and repaired with a five-gallon oil-can hammered flat and double. A sink, a dirty roller-towel, several chairs, and a wooden table completed the picture.
Her cares now over, she stands drying her hands on a roller-towel in the kitchen, while her only daughter, the gentle Mary, stands in the doorway with the afternoon sun streaming in spots of flickering golden light on her smooth pale-brown hair, a petite figure in a full stuff petticoat and white short gown, she stands reaching up one hand and cooing to something among the apple-blossoms, and now a Java dove comes whirring down and settles on her finger, and we, that have seen pictures, think, as we look on her girlish face, with its lines of statuesque beauty, on the tremulous, half-infantine expression of her lovely mouth, and the general air of simplicity and purity, of some old pictures of the girlhood of the Virgin.
He said yesterday when he left 'em here's where he's a-comin'" Bud's mouth was so full he could hardly articulate "an' when I told 'em, he jest blew his little whistle like what they all carry three times, and those men every one jest stopped right where they was, whatever they was doin'. Long Bill had the comb in the air gettin' ready to comb his hair, an' he left it there and come away, and Big Jim never stopped to wipe his face on the roller-towel, he just let the wind dry it; and they all hustled on their horses fast as ever they could and beat it after Jap Kemp.
In New Canaan one never went up-stairs during the day, except at the rare times when obliged to change one's clothes. Every one washed at the pump and used the one family roller-towel hanging on the porch. Miss Margaret, ever since her arrival in the neighborhood, had been the subject of wide-spread remark and even suspicion, because she "washed up-stairs" and even sat up-stairs! in her bedroom!
She had finished mixing the bread, and had washed her hands and was wiping them on the roller-towel in the kitchen. "Maybe I did," admitted Henry. "You look like yourself to-night, anyhow. How is Rose?" "Rose is all right. Young girls are always getting nervous kinks.
With repeated rubbings on the clean roller-towel behind him, turning back of cuffs and a general straightening of the person and freshening of the attire, the Frenchman at length proffered his fat hand, and Ringfield clasped it with a firm, bold grasp; his muscles were twice as strong as those of the Frenchman, for while the one had been chiefly employed in the kitchen, at a rude desk, and had rusted in long loafing and idling intervals, the other had maintained his rowing and paddling and his interest in other athletic pursuits; even a half-dozen lessons in boxing had he laid to his credit.
"No," said the hostess. "She is just back home from college and she is suffering from the family grammar." It All Seemed So Unnecessary A city man once had occasion, says "Lippincott's Magazine," to stop at a country home where a tin basin and a roller-towel on the back porch sufficed for the family's ablutions.
Drying his fingers slowly on the long roller-towel, he stood gazing with a kind of hard abstraction across the darkening field, the strip of faded colorless shore, and the chill gray sea, to the dividing point of land on the opposite coast, which in the dying daylight was silhouetted against the cold horizon.
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