“Stop, Miss Mary,” cried the maid; “you will be down, and the glass after you. Let me reach it, or whatever else you want.”
“We want only the glass, thank you. There, down it comes, safe. But, O dear, what a tarnished, battered old frame it has!”
“You can never use that glass, Miss Mary. It cannot have been used these fifty years.”
“Not quite,” said Mary; “for I remember nurse’s dandling Anna before it. But I had no idea it was so shabby. Let us take it down and dust it, however: it may look better then.”
Just as they reached the head of the stairs, the maid holding one end, and the girls the other, the part of the frame which they held gave way, and it was a wonder the glass was not broken.
“I had like to have fallen down stairs, glass and all,” exclaimed the maid. “Here’s an end of the matter, young ladies; so let us put it where we found it.”
No: Mary thought it would answer their purpose better than ever now; so she pulled off the rest of the frame, which split with a touch. She desired the maid to rub up the glass, while she and Anna went back into the lumber-room to find some paper, the same as the hangings of the green parlour. This they found; and when they had called John in to nail up the glass in the little room, opposite the balcony, and sufficiently low to reflect the landscape beyond, and sent down into the kitchen for some paste, they began to cut out the trailing pattern of the paper, and so fixed it on the edge of the glass as to make a very pretty border, and one more corresponding with the rest of the furniture than a gilt frame would have been. Even the maid admired what she thought, at first, a mere fancy; and the girls saw their own faces oftener that day than on any preceding day of their lives. Mary thought that one ornament more was wanted to make all complete: she asked Anna if a white cast of some sort—a vase or a bust—would not look very well in the corner where the harp-lute rested. Anna agreed, and inclined for a vase, which they might fill with flowers. Mary thought the head of a poet or a musician would be more suitable. Who should it be? The only musician she remembered to have seen on the Italian’s board was Handel; and Handel was sadly fat and ugly. She did not know who it could be but Milton; and that face, beautiful as it was, was known to every body by this time. It reminded her, however, that she might perhaps get some hints about ornamenting their bower from “Paradise Lost;” for she liked what she had read of Eve’s preparation of a repast for the angel. So, while Anna ran to the window to watch for the Italian with his image-board, who was sure to pass, Mary settled herself in the balcony to read about Paradise.
As soon as she was fairly lost to all outward things, and present only with Adam and Eve, seeing how
“raised of grassy turf
Their table was, and mossy seats had round,”