Mabell S. C. Smith

“ In a near-by tree an insect insisted that “Katy did,” and in the grass a cricket chirruped its shrill call.
“I do feel that Aunt Louise’s being able to build this pretty house after all her years of wandering is about the nicest thing that ever happened out of a fairy story,” murmured Helen softly to her mother, but loudly enough for the others to hear.
“There are people who talk about the law of compensation,” smiled Mrs. Morton in the darkness. “They think that if one good is lacking in our lives other goods take its place.” ”

“ A mother feels that she can do as her judgment dictates with her own children, but with her stepchildren she weighs everything with even greater care, because she feels an added responsibility toward them.”
“But she can’t love them as she does her own children,” said Ethel Blue.
“I think there is very little difference,” said her Aunt Marion. “I am not your stepmother but at the same time I am not your own mother, and I am not conscious of loving you any less than I love Ethel Brown. You are both my dear girls.” ”

“ I call it merely an understanding of the financial law and a lack of understanding of the law of kindness.”
“I don’t see what law dear Aunt Louise could have broken to have made her have such a hard time,” wondered Ethel Blue. “Her husband being killed and her having to wander about without a home for so many years—that seems like a hard punishment.”
“Men have decided that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’!” said her aunt, “and the same thing is true of laws that are not man-made.”
“That seems awfully hard,” objected Helen; “it doesn’t seem fair to punish a person for what he doesn’t know.” ”

“ Is covered now with mold and moss,
But still her deathless banner flies,
And keeps the color of the skies,
A nation thrills, a nation bleeds,
A nation follows where it leads,
And every man is proud to yield
His life upon a crimson field
For Betsy’s battle flag.”
“When was it that Washington made his historic visit to Betsy?” asked Roger of Helen.
“That was in June of 1776. A year later, on the fourteenth of June, 1777, Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as our flag.”
“That’s why June 14th is celebrated as Flag Day, I suppose,” said Ethel Blue. ”

“ Roger ran from his vegetable garden to see what was the matter; Helen appeared from her garden of wild flowers; Miss Merriam, the baby’s caretaker, ran from the porch where she was talking with the Ethels who were waiting for the out-of-town members of the U. S. C. to arrive. At the moment when all these people were rushing to the rescue, Margaret and James Hancock, just off the Glen Point street car, hurried from the corner, and Della and Tom Watkins, arrived by the latest train from New York, burst open the gate in their excitement. ”

“ The big things of life are more absorbing but very few of us encounter the big things of life. Most of us meet the small matters, the everyday happenings, and nothing else.”
“Isn’t life full of a mess of ’em!” ejaculated Roger. “Getting up and dressing and brushing your hair and eating three meals a day have to be done three hundred sixty-five times a year; whereas you hear some splendid music or come across a fine new poem or find yourself in a position where you can do a real kindness about once in a cat’s age. ”

“ Miss Graham laughed at Ethel’s vigorous protest, but she said that she, too, did not like a central light over the dining table.
“There is no need of a very brilliant light in a dining room,” she said. “You can see the people about the table without any difficulty in a subdued light and the general effect is far more beautiful than when people are sitting in a glare.”
“I think candle light is prettiest for the dining room,” said Ethel Blue.
“It is prettiest for the table,” replied Miss Graham. “The place where you really want a strong light is over the serving table behind the screen. ”

“ Are you going to take a picture of the vegetable garden?”
“Certainly I am. And of tomatoes that were started with and without dirt bands.”
Roger’s chief attention during the summer garden campaign had been devoted to the raising of vegetables, while the girls had done wonders with flowers.
“What are dirt bands?” inquired Helen.
“I know,” cried the voice of Ethel Brown who came in sight through the pergola. “They’re brown paper cuffs to put around young plants. It keeps the earth all close and cozy and warm and they grow faster than the ones that don’t wear such fine clothes.” ”

“ Ethel Blue nodded, her eyes filling.
“I wish you’d give us your idea now, Tom,” called Helen, seeing from across the room that her little cousin was not far from tears, and Tom went away, leaving her to let her fingers slip softly through a simple tune that her Aunt Marion had taught her to play in the dusk without her notes. She wondered if she would ever do it again; if her new mother and her father would want her to play it to them; if she should be happy, the only young person in the household when she had been accustomed to a large family ”

“ A brick terrace always makes me think of some old country house in England, with its dark red walls buried among the brilliant green foliage. So many of those houses have terraces like this, partly roofed like yours, and wide enough to be really an extra room.”
“Aunt Louise’s terrace is really two extra rooms,” said Ethel Blue, “because it opens from the drawing room and also from the dining room.”
“We’re going to have all our meals out here in pleasant weather, whenever it’s warm enough,” said Dorothy.
“I can see you’re sufficiently afraid of New Jersey mosquitoes to have a part screened.” ”

“ Smith. “A living room is really a room which is used both as a sitting room and a dining room. No room which is used for only one of those purposes should be called a living room.”
“Lots of people do,” insisted Ethel Brown.
“But they are not right,” returned her aunt.
“Drawing room seems a very formal name for it,” Helen said. “Of course we’re used to it, because Grandmother Emerson always calls her parlor a drawing room, but she has a huge, big room, so my idea of a drawing room is always something immense.” ”

“ Detaching the hose and spray from the bath-room he trotted off immediately after breakfast, intent on putting into effect his mother’s idea. It seemed to him that it would be a delight to live in a house where one might enter into the kitchen at any moment and find the cook spraying the walls with a hose. If the reality proved to be as charming as the anticipation, he was going to beg his mother to have their own kitchen made over promptly.
The workmen were all upstairs at Sweetbrier Lodge but the lower doors were open so that there was no difficulty in achieving an entrance. ”

“ The road lay through a rolling country with pleasant suburban towns and comfortable-looking farm houses. At Valley Forge they felt like real pilgrims at a shrine, for they remembered the bitter suffering of the American soldiers and the even greater mental anguish of their leader, who sometimes felt that he had led his brave men into this distress, and might not be able to lead them to the victory which he must have, if the colonies were to become independent of the land they had sprung from. ”

“ Miss Graham made no comment on these criticisms but led the way to another picture, also of a girl, but this time of a girl in the dress of a peasant and not handsomely arrayed as was Miss Farren.
“There is a bigger difference than clothes between these two,” said Della, “but I don’t know just what it is. This girl isn’t pretty like Miss Farren.”
“Do you know who this is?” asked Miss Daisy.
“Somebody who is thinking a lot,” said Ethel Brown.
“She is seeing things in her mind,” said Ethel Blue. ”

“ Sure enough, the horse-radish had sent forth shoots and a head of small leaves quite tall enough for the size of the garden, and its body looked brownish and gnarled like some bit of queer Oriental wood. Dorothy had taken up little plants of running growth like partridge berry and she had collected many wee ferns.
“We can sprinkle a pinch or two of grass seed and bird seed over them all when they’re done,” she said. “That ought to bring up something fresh every little while.”
“These will be all started for your housewarming,” suggested Helen. ”

“ When the earth is hoed up to my stem.”
“Oo-hoo!” came a voice from the Lodge. “Come in and help.”
“There’s Dorothy calling,” cried Ethel Brown, and they all moved toward the house where they found their cousin on the back porch with an array of plates, bowls, stones, small plants, tiny trees and small china figures before her.
“May I inquire, madam, what on earth—” began Roger, but Ethel Brown’s exclamation enlightened him.
“You’re making Japanese gardens!”
“I’m going to try to. I think they’re awfully pretty and cunning. Let’s each make one.” ”

“ They were all of them more or less interested in photography and now they tried to take photographs that would be real pictures.
“It isn’t so easy to make a picture by selecting what you want to have and leaving out the things you don’t want,” said Roger to Helen one morning as they walked toward Sweetbrier Lodge, “when the things are right there in the landscape and won’t get out of the camera’s way. A painter would leave out that stupid old wooden house in the field there, but he’d leave in the splendid elm bending over it. Now if I ‘shoot’ the elm I’ve got to ‘shoot’ the house, too.” ”

“ The rocks look as if they ought to be just where they are.”
“Mrs. Schermerhorn’s rockery looks as if she had said, ‘Lo, I’ll have a rockery,’ and then she stuck it right in the middle of her lawn where no collection of rocks has been for twenty years.”
“And she has hot-house ferns in it!”
The brother and sister laughed delightedly at their neighbor’s ideas of natural beauty.
“Perhaps it was fortunate that Dorothy didn’t have a hot-house to draw on,” said Roger, moving from one side to another of his cousin’s rockery in order to get the best view of its remaining loveliness. ”

“ A GOLDEN COLOR SCHEME
When the time came for having the interior decorating done in Sweetbrier Lodge and for getting the furniture, the U. S. C. felt that they were really in the very midst of a delightful experience. The attic was furnished with brown wicker, as Miss Graham had suggested. A small upright piano was brought up through a window, and this pleasant, quiet room at the top of the house, served to give Dorothy a spot for practising where she would disturb no one. ”

“ On the morning of Columbus Day the Mortons and Hancocks went into New York to the Watkinses. Della’s and Tom’s father was a clergyman who worked among the foreigners of the East Side. This was an advantage to the Club members when they watched the procession that wound its way from the lower part of the city northward to Columbus Circle at 59th Street.
“These people must come from all over Europe,” exclaimed Ethel Brown as bits of conversation in languages that she never had heard drifted to her ears. ”

“ Dicky decided.
“I’d wait a minute until they begin to warm the whole of their house by the warmth from their bodies,” urged Ethel Brown, and her brother agreed that there was no need of haste, but he watched them closely until he saw that they were not trampling on each other’s backs or sitting down hard on each other’s heads.
“When will they come out again?” asked Dorothy, who had never seen an incubator and brooder in operation before and who was immensely interested.
“When they are hungry.”
“How soon will that be?”
“In about two hours. They’re a good deal like babies.” ”

“ They all laughed, for Roger, as if to illustrate her remarks, gave a slap at a buzzing enemy at just the appropriate moment.
“Another thing that helps to make Aunt Louise a happy woman now is that she is at peace not only with everybody on earth but also with herself. If she makes a mistake she doesn’t fret about it; she does her best to remedy it, and she does her best not to repeat it. ”

“ Miss Graham did not seem to single out Ethel Blue for particular attention. They naturally drifted together when there was a large party, because their tastes were similar.
“I think your aunt Daisy is nicer than any aunt in the world except my aunt Marion,” Ethel Blue confided to Margaret one day.
“That’s just about what James and I think,” said Margaret.
“Has she finished her Englewood house?” inquired Ethel.
“Yes, that was done some time ago. That’s why she has been able to go to see Mrs. Smith so many times recently. She has spent several afternoons at Sweetbrier Lodge, you know.” ”

“ She was awfully interested and said she felt as if she knew all of you people and the Watkinses quite well, we talked about you so much. Then we told her about Dorothy’s house, and how Mrs. Smith had said we might all give our opinions about the decorating, and she asked us to tell you that she’d be very glad indeed to act as consulting decorator when you come to the inside work.”
“Why, that’s awfully sweet of her!” exclaimed Dorothy. “Mother isn’t going to have a regular decorator, and I know she’ll be immensely pleased to have Miss—what is your aunt’s name?” ”

“ If you are going to read you turn on a light beside your reading stand. An upper light is usually for general illumination and a side light for real service.”
“A combination of the two lights makes a room ready for anything,” said Ethel Blue.
“I want you to notice particularly the fixtures that your Aunt Louise has selected for indirect lighting,” said Miss Graham. “She has chosen beautiful bowls that look like alabaster. They turn upwards and the bulbs are hidden in them. The strong glare is against the ceiling so that the people get only the reflected light. ”

“ She has every kind of electric thing she has ever heard of, I do believe.”
“The electrician was there to-day as I told you, arranging wires in the kitchen.”
“I was trying to count up as I was lying here, all the things in the house that go by electricity. Of course there’s the door bell to begin with. Then there are all the lighting switches—the one in the vestibule and all the regular ones in the halls and rooms and a lot of them in the different closets, so that she never will have to struggle around in the dark for anything she is hunting for.” ”

“ They went through miles and miles of streets lined with small houses.
“These are the houses which have given Philadelphia the nick-name of the ‘City of Homes,’” exclaimed Mrs. Morton. “You see, in New York people are crowded on to a small tongue of land, between two rivers. Here there are two rivers also, but the space between them is wider. There’s nothing to prevent the city’s crossing the Schuylkill and running westward, as it began to do many long years ago.”
“These houses aren’t very beautiful,” commented Ethel Blue.
[146]
“They are very neat,” said Ethel Brown. ”