Allison deposited the bowl of pop-corn in her lap and passed her the basket of apples, and then flourished the popper like a drum-major's baton. "Now all together!" she cried, and the five voices rang out like one:
"There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she.
The Lady of Shalott.
"And moving through a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near,
Winding down to Camelot.
There the river eddy whirls,
And the surly village churls
And the red cloaks of market-girls
Pass onward from Shalott.
"Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,
An abbot on an ambling pad,
Sometimes a curly shepherd lad
Or long-haired page in crimson clad
Goes by to Camelot.
And sometimes through the mirror blue
The knights come riding two by two.
She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott."
"Why, she was an old maid! Wasn't she!" said Katie, so plaintively as they finished that they all laughed.
"That's what Allison and Betty and Lloyd are going to be, mother," said Kitty, teasingly. Lloyd, with a very red face, hastened to change the subject. She snuggled up against Mrs. Walton's knee, saying, as she looked into the glowing fire, "This is the best time of the day, when the wind goes 'Whooo' in the chimney, and it's cold and dark outdoahs and cheerful and bright inside. It's just the time for story-telling. Don't you know one, Mrs. Walton?"
"Of course she does," Kitty answered for her. "And if you don't know one, you can make one up to order. Can't you, mamsie?"
"Your poem suggested a story," answered Mrs. Walton, and with one hand smoothing Lloyd's fair head as it rested against her knee, and the other stroking Kitty's dark one in her lap, she began:
"Once upon a time (the same time that the Lady of Shalott wove her magic web, and near the four gray towers from which she watched the road running down to Camelot), there lived three weavers. Their houses stood side by side, and such had been their equal fortunes that whatever happened under the roof of one had always happened under the roofs of the others. They wove the same patterns in their looms, and they received the same number of shillings for their webs. They sang the same songs, told the same tales, ate the same kind of broth from the same kind of bowls, and dressed in the same coarse goods of hodden gray.
"But they were unlike as three weavers could possibly be. The first insisted on weaving all his webs a certain length, regardless of the size of the man who must wear the mantle. (Each web was supposed to be just long enough to make one mantle.) The second carelessly wove his any length that happened to be convenient, and stretched or cut it afterward to fit whomsoever would take it. But the third, with great painstaking and care, measured first the man and then the web by the inches and ells of his carefully notched yardstick.
"Now to each weaver was born a daughter, all on the same day, and they named them Hertha, Huberta, and Hildegarde. On the night after the christening, as the three men sat smoking their pipes on the same stoop, the father of Hertha said, 'Do not think me puffed up with unseemly pride, good neighbours, but wonderful fortune hath befallen me and mine this day. Clotho, the good fairy of all the weavers, was present at my Hertha's christening, and left beside her cradle a gift: a tiny loom that from beam to shuttle is of purest gold. And she whispered to me in passing, "Good fortune, Herthold. It is written in the stars that a royal prince shall seek to wed thy child."'
"But Herthold's news caused no astonishment to his neighbours. What had happened under the roof of one had happened under the roofs of all, and the same good fortune was written in the stars for each, and the same gift had been left by each child's cradle. So the three friends rejoiced together, and boasted jestingly among themselves of the three kings' sons who should some day sit down at their tables.