Retty wound one corner around herself, and two of the young men rolled Margaret and several of the other girls in the other end amid the shouts of the lookers-on.
Then grandmother shook it out and folded it.
"There!" she exclaimed, "to-morrow I'll put on the binding. And, Hannah Ann, you have a good beginning. Not every little girl can show such a quilt as that, pieced all by herself before she was eight years old!"
"But you helped, grandmother——"
"Nonsense, child! Just a piece now and then! And I've a nice pair of wool blankets I'm saving up for you that I spun myself. You'll have a good many things saved up in a dozen years."
What fun they had afterward! There were two black fiddlers in the hall; one was Cato, Aunt Mary's grandson, a stylish young fellow much in demand for parties. They danced and danced.
Steve took his little sister out several times, and John danced with her. Her father thought her the very prettiest one in the crowd. Her mother let her stay up until eleven.
"I'm so sorry you are going away," said Retty, the next morning. "I never did have such a good time in my life. I don't see why we can't all live together in this big house!"
In the new year the real business of changing began. It was hard to select a house. Joe said all New York was going up-town, and that before many years the lower part of the city would be given over to business. Bond and Amity Street, around St. John's Park and East Broadway were still centres of fashion. The society people had come up from the Bowling Green and the Battery, though there were still some beautiful old houses that business people clung to because they wanted to be near to everything. Harlem and Yorkville were considered country. Up on the east side as far as Eightieth or Ninetieth Street there were some spacious summer residences with beautiful grounds. A few fine mansions clustered about University Square. City Hall Park was still covered with fine growing shade-trees. There was such a magnificent fountain that Lydia Maria Child, describing it, said there was nothing to equal it in the Old World.
Still, the unmistakable trend was up-town. Grace Church was agitating a new building at Tenth Street. Rows of houses were being put up on the new streets, though down-town people rather scoffed and wondered why people were not going up to Harlem and taking their business places along.