"I will," said Elizabeth.
The barn chamber, reached by a rickety stairway leading from the region of the stalls, from which a white mare poked a friendly nose as she went by, proved to be a storehouse of the most heterogeneous assemblage of objects Elizabeth had ever imagined. The overflow of fifty years of housecleaning and readjustment had been brought together under those dusty rafters.
"Poor things," Elizabeth thought, looking about at the old settees and rocking chairs, broken backed and legless. "A horse in that condition is put out of its misery. I don't suppose they could blindfold and shoot an old sofa, but they might cremate it, or something."
She came upon the wreck of a little old rocking chair, a child's chair, with a back beautifully decorated with grape clusters and leaves, and two limp, broken arms stuck out helplessly. These she tied up with strips of faded blue cambric that were lying about, and set the little chair gallantly rocking.
There were innumerable cracked china jugs, big bowls, and strange wooden utensils and cabinets; beds that had been taken apart, forlorn, carved old posters minus springs or mattresses that were merely being used as pens to keep forlorn chairs and tables herded together. These things were all draped with dust and spiders' webs; and in a corner, from a pile of ancient straw, Elizabeth heard a faint, continuous rustling.
"Mice!" she said, "but they can't frighten me unless they get a good deal nearer. Still, I guess I'll look carefully around and choose my nearest exit."
Her first discovery for her house furnishing was a flag-bottomed chair with rockers about two inches long. It was perfectly preserved. It wasn't a child's chair, though it was very little of its age, she told herself. The next was a spinning wheel, which was the first one she had ever seen outside of a picture book.
"I'm going to get Grandmother to teach me to spin on it," she said.
There was a writing desk, a rosewood box with inlaid corner pieces, and a short-legged, square stand to set it on; and then more rustling in the straw sent Elizabeth suddenly downstairs again, though not until she had segregated her chosen furniture.
"Zeckal, whoever he may be, can come and get it," she said.