“I couldn’t help just seeing what it was all about when I spread the sheets on the dresser. You said I must have fresh papers for the dresser and shelves——”
“Fresh paper on the dresser?” I exclaimed, and went hurriedly into the kitchen. Sure enough, the dresser, the pantry and scullery shelves, and all other available surfaces, including the deep window-sill and the tops of the safes, had been carefully covered with white paper; prompt investigation proved them to be pages from some of the various MSS. I had left in piles on the settle when I went out. Of course the writing was face downwards. I lifted things and examined what was beneath. The vegetable dishes on the dresser were reposing on portions of a serial story; canisters, saltbox and biscuit-tins shared the back of one of a series of Nature Study articles; the Siberian wolves were gnashing their horrid fangs beneath the knife-machine. I left the anonymous letter to an amiable if inglorious end, laid along the saucepan shelf, but I hurriedly collected the rest to the accompaniment of Eileen’s plaintive tones—
“I thought you had put them there for waste paper. And the back of every sheet was so beautifully clean, and I had made my kitchen look so nice with them.”
All of which goes to illustrate the risk one runs in sending MSS. to editors, more especially to feminine editors possessed of kitchens.
Though the fall of snow did not last very long, the wind howled and moaned around the house all the evening, and roared in the wide chimneys like a 32-feet open diapason pedal pipe. Virginia suggested to Eileen that she should go out and put a little salt on the wolves’ tails to see if that would quiet them.
I thoroughly enjoy the moaning of the wind if I am surrounded by creature comforts—a big fire, a good cup of tea, or something interesting in that line. I never feel a desire for intellectual or introspective pursuits when the moan is most robust. When a raw nor’wester or a bullying sou’wester howls outside the door and windows, making the pine trees creak and groan like the wheels of an old timber waggon, and the evergreen firs wildly wave their branches like long dark plumes, I want to be able to hug myself to myself in the midst of warmth and good cheer, and in the company of some congenial fellow being. Then I give the fire a further poke and another log, remarking contentedly: “Just hark at the wind! What a night! Isn’t it cosy indoors!” And the brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and the plates and jugs and dishes on the dresser blink acquiescence.
Under such circumstances I love the howlers on these hills. But if I were a studious ascetic, burning the midnight oil—and very little else—I’m afraid that the sound of the wailing up and down the scale in minor sixths, coupled with the lack of comforting food and blazing fire and sympathetic companionship, would make me desperately melancholy indeed.
Now we were indoors we could defy the weather, and here at least firewood was plentiful—not the “five sticks a penny, take it or leave it,” that had been our portion in town, but as much as ever one wanted, and plenty more where the last came from. We soon had crackling blazes all over the house, and you should have seen Eileen’s almost awestruck countenance when she was told to make herself a fire in her own bedroom! “Now I know what it’s like to be the Queen!” she exclaimed.