The two younger boys staid with him while we older ones fell to work like beavers in Bob’s room.
We had a hard time though you’d better believe, trying to keep quiet, for the fellows would forget every now and then and speak or laugh out loud. We had Archibald, the school janitor, up to help us, and we made quick work of what we had to do I can tell you.
To begin with, his room was just the forlornest place that ever you saw, and no mistake! We furnish our own rooms at Dr. Thomas’, and we always try to fix them up rather gorgeous. Our mothers and sisters are always sending us gimcracks to make our dens kind of gay. Then if fellows happen to have any girl friends you know, they are always sending them tidies and such trash for philopene presents, and though we don’t much care to have the things round under feet, somehow if one fellow has them, all the rest wants them too.
But I just wish you could have seen little Richards’ room! the barest, coldest place! There was no carpet, only a common sort of rug before the little old stove, that was so wheezy and full of cracks that it would not do much but smoke anyway. There was a bedstead, and his study table with his books on it. There was a picture of his mother, and one of his sister—rather pretty she was too, with smiling eyes like Richards’, and soft hair in little rings about her forehead and face. Thorndike said that she would be very pretty when she was older—say seventeen. Mrs. Thomas’ cousin is sixteen and a half. Bob had put a little wreath of some kind round the two pictures. There was a plant too on the table. He brought it in his hand all the way from Machias, with a brown paper bag over the top of it, and now it was just ready to bloom.
The first thing we did was to bring in a big warm carpet all made and fitted to the room, and we spread it down, but didn’t nail it because of the noise and because we thought he’d like to do it himself. Then we covered the old table and mantle with jolly, bright cloths. We never could have picked them out in the world if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Thomas’ cousin, the one who played on the piano for us. She is rather nice for a girl, and sometimes wears little gold horse-shoes in her ears. Jeff Ryder is going to marry her when he is twenty-one, but nobody knows it yet, not even she. Jeff only told me one night when I had a sore throat and he slept with me. So she helped us pick out the things, and gave us a tidy, and a pin-cushion the size of a bean bag. Then we moved in a first-class stove, and Archibald set her up and built a rouser of a fire in her. We put a pair of new blankets on the bed, and Jeff Ryder brought out a student’s lamp—one of the double headers; the two Belknap boys—that means Will and me—gave a big easy chair to go beside the table; then the Everett boys gave a set of book shelves; and Dr. Thomas gave a box of books, as many as a dozen I should think. We left these in the box, for Will and I always think that half the fun of having presents is opening the bundles ourselves. Harry Thorndike gave the stove and a little clock from his own room. We put the pin-cushion on the bureau, and the tidy on the chair, and while we were standing there looking at it all, there came the very softest kind of a step outside and there was the Doctor’s wife. She had a picture in her arms, one that I had seen a good many times in her own sitting-room. It was quite a large picture of a woman with a sort of hood on her hair and a baby in her arms; both the woman and the baby had a kind of shiny hoop just above their heads in the air, looking as if in a minute they’d drop down and make crowns. Will told me once that he thought it was a picture of Mrs. Thomas and the baby, but I think not, though there was the same kind of look too on both their faces.
“Hang this up, boys,” she said; “he is very fond of it, and I have had it for a good many years. I’ve babies of my own now to look at, so we will give this to Bob. Let us hang it over the mantle-piece.”
There is something rather queer about the Doctor’s wife. It isn’t that she isn’t pretty, for she is; and it isn’t that she is odd or old, for she is younger a good deal than the Doctor, and as kind and jolly as a girl; but there is something queer about her, for I don’t know how many fellows have said she seemed just like their mothers; and what I want to know is how in creation can she look and seem like the mothers of so many boys—dark and light, and homely and handsome, English, German, American, and even one colored fellow said she made him think of his “mammy.” I think it must be a kind of motherish way which she has, that makes us all feel so about her.
She gave the picture to Hal Thorndike and he hung it up, and I tell you the room did look just immense.
Then we went down stairs and brought Bob up again, and sat him down in his new chair, and told him not to take off his blinder till he’d counted three hundred, and then we all ran down into Will’s and my room to wait and see what he would do. We rather expected to hear him shout, or tear round, or do something or other; but we counted three hundred two or three times over, and not a sound came from his room.
By and by Jeff said he was going up to see what the row was—which was only his way of speaking; for you couldn’t call it a row, could you, when there wasn’t a sound to be heard!