And a pumpkin scooped, with a yellow rim,
Is the bonny bowl they breakfast in."
"Those houses make me think of that," she said; "and the picture over it—do you remember?"
Everybody remembers "Mother Goose." You can't quote or remind amiss from her.
"To be sure," Frank answered, laughing. "And the histories and the lives there carry out the idea. They all came from Lancashire, or somewhere across the big sea, and they were all born under the thorn, pretty much,—of poverty and pinches. But they sup their buttermilk, and the bowl is bonny, if it is only a pumpkin rind. Isn't that rhyme just the perfection of the glorifying of common things by imagination?"
"It always seems to me that living might be pretty in such places. All just alike, and snug together. I should think Mrs. Fitzpatrick and Mrs. Mahoney would have beautiful little ambitions and rivalries about their tidy parlors and kitchens, setting up housekeeping side by side, as they do. I should think they might have such nice neighborliness, back and forth. It looks full of all possible pleasantness; like the cottage quarters of the army families, down at Fort Warren, that you see so white and pretty among the trees, as you go by in the steamboat."
"Only they don't make it out," said Frank Sunderline, "after all. The prettiest part of it is the going by in the steamboat. Here, I mean. The 'Mother Goose' idea is very suggestive; but if you went through that block, from beginning to end, I wonder how many 'bonny bowls' you would really find, that you'd be willing to breakfast out of?"
"I wonder how many bonny bowls there'll be, one of these days, in the cook's closet of the grand house we're going to?" said Ray.
"That's it," said Sunderline. "It's pretty to build, and it's pretty to look at; but I should like to hear what your mother would say to the 'conveniences.' One convenience wants another to take care of it, till there's such a compound interest of them that it takes a regiment just to man the pumps and pipes, and open and shut the cupboards. Living doesn't really need so much machinery. But every household seems to want a little universe of its own, nowadays."
"I suppose they make it wrong side out," said Ray. "I mean all outside."