Linda’s Crazy Quilt.
BY FANNIE WILLIAMS.
“Oh, dear!” sighed Linda Trafton, turning over the pages of a closely-written, school-girlish letter, which her brother Fred had tossed into her lap, on returning from the post office. “I do wish I could get silk pieces enough to make a crazy quilt. Cousin Dell writes all about hers, and it must be very pretty.”
“Crazy quilt! That’s about all I’ve heard for the last six months! I should think you girls had all gone crazy yourselves!” ejaculated Fred.
“Why, Fred!” was Linda’s only answer to this outburst.
She was a very sweet-tempered little maid, with soft, brown hair and soft, brown eyes, that matched in color as exactly as eyes and hair could match, and gave her a look of being—as indeed she was—too gentle to dispute, or even to argue, with anybody, least of all with Fred, who was fifteen, and three years her elder, and always took a tone of great superiority toward his little sister.
Still, he was a pretty good sort of brother, as brothers go; and, in Linda’s eyes, he was a prodigy of cleverness.
So, whenever they happened to differ in opinion, and Fred expressed himself in this vehement style, she only looked at him in a deprecating way, and murmured:
“Why, Fred!”
“Well, I should like to know,” continued Fred, “what could be more idiotic than the way you spend your time, you girls, fitting those ridiculous, catty-cornered pieces of silk together, and working them all over with bugs and cobwebs and caterpillars, and little boys in Mother Hubbard dresses! You may well call ’em crazy quilts! I don’t believe there was ever anything crazier, unless it was the lunatic who first invented them!”
“Why, Fred!” said Linda, again. “Now, I think they are too pretty for anything!”
“Pretty!” snorted Fred. “They’re made out of the last things that you’d suppose anybody would ever think of putting into a bed-quilt. I can’t get a chance to wear a neck-tie half out before somebody wants it. Kate Graham spoke for my last new one the next day after I bought it. And I hardly dare to put my hat down, where there’s a girl around, for fear she’ll capture my hat-band!”
By this time, Linda was laughing outright.
“Oh, you are so funny, Fred! But you only just ought to see Kate Graham’s crazy quilt. I know you couldn’t help calling it lovely. She has got pieces of ever so many wedding dresses in it; but I don’t know who would give me any. Aunt Mary never will get married, nor Cousin Susie, nor our Bridget, unless Pat hurries up with his courting—and there’s nobody else. Besides, they are all making
crazy quilts of their own. I would start one with papa’s old silk handkerchief and his Association badge, if I thought I could ever get pieces enough to finish it; but I don’t see how I could.”
“Bess Hartley told me that she was going to send off somewhere and get a lot of pieces that are put up to sell. You get a whole package of assorted colors for a dollar,” suggested Fred.
“Oh, that would make it cost too much! Mamma would not let me do that,” said Linda, shaking her head. “She says it is well enough to use up odd bits of silk in that way, if one happens to have them; but she doesn’t think it right to spend money in such a manner, instead of using it for better purposes—and I don’t suppose it is.”
“Well, I am sure I don’t know what you are going to do,” was Fred’s consoling observation. “You’d be as crazy as the rest of the girls if you began to piece a quilt; and I don’t know but you will go crazy if you can’t.”
With which conclusion, Fred walked off whistling, and left Linda to read her Cousin Dell’s letter over again, and wish that Patrick O’Brien would propose to Bridget, if he was ever going to, so that she could get married, and have a new silk dress for her wedding.
However, Linda was not the girl to fret and worry after things which were unattainable.
Fred would have his joke, but she was not going to make herself unhappy just because she had not the materials for making silk patchwork, as Dell and the rest of her girl friends were doing. There were plenty of other pleasures and amusements within her reach, and the one that she enjoyed most of all came in her way, as it happened, the very next morning.
“OH, MRS. BURBANK! WHAT BEAUTIFUL PIECES!” CRIED LINDA. “WHERE DID THEY ALL COME FROM?”
Her father said to her, as he rose from the table after breakfast:
“Linda, would you like a ride, my dear? I am going to drive over to East Berlin, and I will take you along, if you would like to go.”
“If I would like it! Why, papa, you know there isn’t anything that I like so much as a good, long ride with you!” cried Linda, dancing with delight, as she ran off to get ready for the drive.
For it was indeed a “good long” ride to East Berlin—fifteen miles at least—and
the day was just as fresh and bright and lovely as a day could be in the fresh and bright and lovely month of May.
The young grass was emerald green along the country roads, the apple trees were all in sheets of bloom, hill-sides were fairly blue with bird-foot violets, and sweet spring flowers were smiling everywhere.
Linda was so full of happiness that she could scarcely keep from singing in concert with the birds that trilled and chirped among the trees on either hand, as the pleasant road led through a piece of woodland.
But the woods came to an end abruptly where the trees had been cut off, and where some men with ox-carts were hauling away the long piles of cord-wood. Then there were fields of plowed ground on each side of the road, and then a long stretch of rocky hills and old pastures, and presently some houses came in sight.
Old, weather-beaten houses they were—a dozen, perhaps, in all. Two or three had once been painted red, and still displayed some dark and dingy traces of that color; but most of them were brown, and some had green moss growing on their broad, sloping roofs—roofs which were two stories high in front, but came down so low at the back that a lively boy might reach them from the ground with very little effort, only the place did not look as if anything so young or so lively as a boy had been seen there for at least twenty years.
Still, it was a pleasant place. There were thickets of lilac and mock-orange bushes around every house, and old-fashioned lilies and roses growing half-wild along the fences.
There were flagged walks leading up to all the doors, with borders of evergreen box, which had once been trim, and still was quaint and pleasing; there were old gardens, where everything was “all run out,” but where the bees and birds appeared to find congenial homes; there were gnarly old apple-trees, with bending, twisted branches that touched the ground and made the most enticing rustic seats.
Withal, there was a calm and stillness brooding on the place that filled one’s fancy with sweet thoughts of olden times and—
“Whoo-oo-oop! Hip, hip, pip, hoo-ray!”
“Good gracious!” cried Mr. Trafton, starting from his pleasant reverie, and clutching at the reins which lay loose upon his knee. “Good gracious! What’s that?”
“It’s a boy!” said Linda, with a quite disgusted accent.
Unquestionably, it was a boy—and a boy of the most aggressively modern type, clad in garments of the very latest cut, from his flannel yachting-shirt to his canvas “base-ball” shoes—a boy with a look as well as a voice, which proclaimed him all alive.
His close-cropped head was bare, and his white straw hat came spinning over the stone wall and into the middle of the road, as if impelled by steam-power, before the boy himself scrambled over, giving vent to another whoop, which would have done credit to a Comanche gone mad.
The whoop and the hat together were enough to startle almost any horse; and, although Mr. Trafton’s fine roadster, “Billy,” was pretty well trained, the combined effect was a little too much for his nerves. He gave a sidelong leap and started to run. His master checked him sharply, and veering from the road, he ran the wheels into a deep rut, and over went the buggy with a crash!
Linda screamed, as she was pitched headlong into a thicket of sweet-fern which grew along the roadside; but the bushes broke her fall, and, beyond the fright and a scratched hand, she received no injury.
Her father was equally fortunate, and, as Billy had recovered from his momentary panic and did not run, the accident appeared, at the first glance, to be nothing serious.
The boy who had caused it came forward, with a look of trepidation upon his countenance, exclaiming:
“I’m awfully sorry, sir; I didn’t mean to frighten your horse. I was down behind the wall and didn’t see you coming, or I wouldn’t have thrown my hat so. I was only scaring a squirrel.”
“He must have been pretty thoroughly scared,” said Mr. Trafton, drily.
However, the boy’s bright face wore an expression of such honest regret that he added, with a good-humored accent:
“Well, well, I was a boy myself once. You must be more careful another time, my lad.”
“That I will, sir.”
And as Mr. Trafton began to raise the overturned buggy, the boy took hold and helped him.
On getting the vehicle righted, they found that one wheel was broken so badly as to need repairs before the journey could be continued, and Mr. Trafton surveyed the damage with grave concern.
The boy gave a low whistle, and murmured:
“Here’s a state of things!”
“I don’t see what I’m going to do,” remarked the gentleman. “There’s nobody in this region who could mend that wheel, I suppose?”
“Oh yes there is!” cried the boy, brightening up. “Doran’s blacksmith shop is only a little ways down the road; you can get the wheel fixed there. I’ll go along and hold up this side of the buggy; and I’ll pay the bill, sir, as I caused the damage.”
Mr. Trafton looked at him approvingly, but answered:
“You need not do that, my boy. The bill won’t amount to much; but the job may take some time—and where can I leave my little girl? I suppose you would not care to wait in the blacksmith shop, Linda?”
Before Linda could reply, the boy said, looking at her frankly, and not at all abashed:
“She can stay with my grandma while you’re having the wheel fixed. Mrs. Deacon Burbank is my grandma; she lives right here, sir,” pointing out the house.
“And where do you live?” asked Mr. Trafton, who took a liking to Mrs. Deacon Burbank’s grandson, for all his annoyance at the trouble which that lively youth had caused him.
“I’m staying with grandma this summer,” said the boy; “but I live in Boston when I’m at home. My name is John Burbank.”
“Well, John, you will have to take Linda to your grandma, for I cannot leave Billy standing here with this broken buggy.”
“All right, sir; I’ll be back in a minute, and help you down to Doran’s.”
So saying, John Burbank led the way, and Linda followed, to the nearest of the brown old houses—a big, broad-roofed domicile, with wide, double doors and narrow windows, and with two great cherry trees in the front yard, looking like two great drifts of snow, they were so thickly covered with white blossoms.
A border of red and yellow tulips, gay daffodils, and “crown imperials,” edged the narrow walk which led from the front gate around to the side door, where they were received by a surprised old lady in gold-bowed spectacles, to whom John presented his companion, with the following concise account of the accident which occasioned her unexpected appearance:
“Grandma, here’s a girl, and her father is out there with his team, and they’ve just had a break-down, and it was all my doing; but I didn’t mean to! I scared the horse, hollering at a squirrel. I’ve got to go and help her father get the buggy down to Doran’s, and she’s going to stay here till it’s fixed, and her name’s Linda. I don’t know what her other name is.”
“Linda Trafton,” supplemented Linda, as the boy paused to catch his breath.
“Johnny,” said the old lady, speaking as severely as a stout old lady with dimples in her cheeks and a twinkle in her eyes could be expected to speak, when addressing her only grandson—“Johnny, I do declare for ’t, you air the worst boy! What under the canopy will you go to cuttin’ up next? Come right in, my dear,” she said to Linda, “and make yourself to home. Johnny, you run along and help the gentleman; and tell Mr. Doran your gran’ther will pay the bill.”
“Oh, I’m going to pay it myself, grandma, with my own pocket-money, if the gentleman will let me; but he says he won’t.”
And Johnny was off before he had done speaking.
“I declare for ’t,” said his grandmother, “that boy is a regular Burbank; jest exactly what the deacon used to be at his age—always into suthin’. I knew the deacon when he wa’n’t any older than Johnny, an’ I remember jest how he used to act. Take off your things, my dear, and make yourself to home.”
She took Linda’s hat and sacque, and
carried them into the spare bed-room, where there was a great “four-poster” bedstead, with blue-and-white chintz hangings and a blue-and-white spread; and then she came and sat down by Linda, and asked her a great many questions about the break-down, and about her father and mother and herself, but she was such a nice old lady that Linda did not mind her being a little inquisitive.
In return, she gave Linda quite a complete history of her own family, and told her a number of entertaining stories about Johnny and Johnny’s father, and about the deacon when he was a boy. Finally, she looked at the queer old clock on the kitchen mantle-shelf, and remarked:
“It’s time I was gittin’ my dinner over to cook, and I guess I shall have to leave you to amuse yourself a little while, my dear. You might go out an’ look ’round the garden, if you want; or maybe you’d ruther go up in the garret, an’ look at Johnny’s picture-books an’ things. He likes to stay up there, when it rains so’t he can’t go out.”
“Oh, I should like that, of all things!” cried Linda, delighted. “I do love a real old-fashioned garret, with all sorts of old things in it!”
“Do you now? Well,” said Mrs. Burbank, beaming over the gold-bowed spectacles, “our garret is full of old truck, an’ you can go up there an’ rummage ’round all you’ve a min’ to.”
She opened the door of a narrow staircase, with steep and well-worn stairs, and told Linda that was the way to the back chamber over the kitchen, and when she got up there she would see the garret stairs; and she guessed Linda could find the way up alone. She was pretty hefty herself, and she didn’t travel up and down stairs any more than she could help.
Linda very quickly found her way to the garret, which proved to be indeed a veritable treasury of “old truck;” and her brown eyes opened wide with ecstasy as she caught sight of a real, genuine spinning-wheel, stowed away under the low, sloping roof.
Then she discovered a smaller wheel, with a motto carved around its rim in quaint lettering, which Linda studied over a long time before she made it out—“Eat not the Bread of Idleness.” She learned afterward that this was a flax-wheel, on which Deacon Burbank’s mother used to spin the thread to weave her linen sheets.
Beside the flax-wheel stood a superannuated chest of drawers, with dingy brass handles, which had once, no doubt, been a fine piece of furniture.
Then there were broken-down chairs, with straight, stiff backs; queer, cracked jugs and bottles, and painted teacups with the handles broken off; and funny old spelling-books and school-readers, all inscribed, in beautiful handwriting, on their yellow fly-leaves:
“John Burbank, his book.”
Linda knew that the John Burbank who had learned his lessons from these old books must have been the deacon “when he was a boy,” and not her young friend, Johnny.
There were several old-fashioned wooden chests among the treasures of this delightful garret, and Linda hesitated to open them at first; but finally she called to mind that she had been given permission to “rummage” as much as she pleased.
One chest, painted green, stood near the narrow window, which threw a checkered square of sunshine upon the garret floor, and as Linda raised the cover she gave a little scream of rapture, for it seemed almost as if she had found a broken rainbow, there was such a glitter of gay colors in the sunlight.
“Oh! oh!” she cried, “what lovely, lovely pieces for a crazy quilt!”
For the old chest was nearly filled with scraps of silk and satin of every shape and size, from bits not over an inch wide to the large, three-cornered pieces, of which there seemed to be a great number, left in cutting trimming-folds “on the bias,” as Linda knew, for she had seen many such remnants proudly displayed by those of her girl friends who happened to be in the good graces of Miss Cranshaw, the village dressmaker. But such brocades and stripes, such “plaid” and “watered” and “figured” silks, such brilliant shades of color as she found among the contents of that chest, her eyes had never looked upon before.
“I wonder if these are pieces of Deacon Burbank’s mother’s dresses?” thought
Linda, as she turned them over, exclaiming, every other minute, “Oh, how pretty!” or “Oh, what a beauty!” for every new piece that she took up seemed prettier than the last. “Why, she must have had as many as Queen Victoria. Why don’t they wear such colors now? Most of the silk dresses that Miss Cranshaw makes are black, or brown, or sage-green, or some other sober shade; but these are all so bright. Oh, what a lovely blue!”
“It is a handsome piece of silk, ain’t it? That was the dress Miss Polly Newcome wore to the inaugeration ball at Washington, ’most forty years ago. They don’t have no such silks in these days.”
Mrs. Deacon Burbank had mounted the garret stairs with footsteps far from noiseless, being, as she said, a “hefty” old lady; but Linda had been too much absorbed to notice her approach until she spoke.
“Oh, Mrs. Burbank! What beautiful pieces!” cried Linda. “Where did they all come from?”
“Why, they come from all ’round, my dear,” said Mrs. Burbank, sitting down with Linda, beside the green chest. “You see, my girls used to take in dressmakin’, when they was young, and the pieces kinder gathered an’ gathered. The girls used to keep the silk pieces separate, thinkin’ they might do suthin’ with ’em sometime; but they never did. They was always too busy to do much putterin’ work. So the pieces have laid there ever sence the girls left home. They all got married, many a long year ago, my girls. Cecilia went to New York, and Evaline lives down in Pennsylvaney—she’s got to be quite an old woman herself now; and Nancy Jane, she’s layin’ in the cemetery over to East Berlin, with her own little girl buried ’long side of her,” said the old lady, sighing. “But they used to be called the best dressmakers there was anywhere round these parts; folks used to come from as far off as Tolland County to have their nice dresses made by the Burbank girls. Miss Polly Newcome went to Washington the winter that her father was elected to the Senate. She was a great beauty, Miss Polly was, an’ they made everything of her in Washington. But my girls had the makin’ of all her new clothes, ’fore she went. This was a dress she wore to a grand dinner-party that was given to her father, Senator Newcome.”
And the old lady picked out a scrap of marvelous brocade, with silver-white roses on a wine-colored ground, and smoothed it on her knee.
“This was the one she wore to the President’s reception”—selecting a bit of rose-colored satin, striped with sky-blue velvet; “and this,” she continued, smoothing out a long strip of changeable silk in green and ruby tints, “was another dinner dress. Here’s a piece of plaid silk that was made up for Squire Harney’s wife, when she was goin’ to Europe; and here’s a piece of Mrs. Doctor Thorne’s dress, that she had made on purpose to wear to a grand party over in Tolland.”
This last was a good-sized square of bright yellow silk, with polka-dots of mazarine blue.
Linda, looking at the gorgeous fabric with admiring eyes, exclaimed:
“I never saw such pieces in all my life! They would make the loveliest crazy quilt!”
“What kind of a quilt, my dear?”
“A crazy quilt,” said Linda, laughing. “Haven’t you ever seen one, Mrs. Burbank? Fred says the person was crazy who first invented them; but I think they’re just as pretty as they can be. It takes a great many pieces of silk, though, to make a bed-quilt, and some of the girls only make sofa-pillows and such things.”
“Oh, you mean patchwork. The land!” said Mrs. Burbank, “I used to make silk patchwork more than sixty years ago. It was all the style then, but I didn’t s’pose they ever done it now.”
“Oh, yes; it is all the style now,” said Linda, with a smile.
“Do tell! I want to know if you like to piece patchwork?” said the old lady, looking over her spectacles at Linda’s girlish face, with its gentle eyes and frame of soft, brown hair. “I declare for’t, you look just as my Nancy Jane did when she was your age! If you want them pieces, child, you can have ’em; I ain’t got any use for ’em, and don’t s’pose I ever shall have. I’m too old to piece patchwork, myself—my eyesight ain’t what it used to be.”
For a moment Linda was speechless with delight, but finally she found her voice, and cried out:
“Oh, Mrs. Burbank! All those lovely crazy pieces! Do you really mean to give them to me?”
“Of course I do, and I’m real glad to see ye so pleased, my dear. Them silk pieces have laid in that chest years an’ years, doin’ nobody any good; an’ they shan’t lay there no longer, if they can make a little girl so happy.”
And the good old lady looked happy herself as she opened another chest, and, taking out an old pillow-case of home-spun linen, began to fill it with the wondrous “crazy pieces.”
When she had crowded them all in and tied the bag with a piece of twine, she said:
“Now, you can take ’em right along with you, an’ whenever your father happens to come this way ag’in, he can bring me back the piller-case, for it was one of Mother Burbank’s, and I shouldn’t want to lose it. I declare for ’t!” she added, “I forgot all about your father, child, I got so took up with lookin’ over them pieces. He’s got the buggy mended, an’ he’s come back after you, so you must come right down. I want you an’ he should have dinner ’fore you go; it’s all ready.”
And happy Linda went down to the kitchen, where she found her father and Johnny, and Deacon Burbank, who had just come home to dinner.
Mr. Trafton was hungry, and quite willing to take dinner at the deacon’s, instead of waiting till they arrived at East Berlin.
They all became very well acquainted in the course of the meal, and Mr. Trafton promised to bring Linda to see Mrs. Burbank, whenever he came that way.
“And I will bring my crazy quilt and show it to you, when I get it done, Mrs. Burbank,” added Linda.
Whereupon Johnny spoke up, and said:
“If you don’t get on with your crazy quilt any faster than my sister does with hers, you won’t ever get it done!”
And Linda told him that sounded just like Fred!
Johnny carried the pillow-case out to the buggy and tucked it under the seat; and Linda could think of nothing but her crazy pieces all the way to East Berlin.
When she got home and showed them to Fred, he declared they were the jolliest, craziest lot of pieces he had seen yet!
And when Linda’s quilt was commenced, all the girls went wild over it; but she laughingly refused to tell them where her pieces came from.
She made a great mystery of the matter, asserting, in reply to all inquiries, that hers would be a crazy quilt with a history, and nobody should know anything about it until the quilt was finished.
A crazy quilt with a history is no trifling piece of work, and the girls have not yet heard the story.