For a week she went about cleaning, and sweeping, and dusting, and making ready generally, for the great event, the opening of her school. Singing as gayly as a lark, she moved furniture up-stairs and down, and debated over and over again upon the best arrangement for effect. The front room was to be especially devoted to the use of her class. The carpet was removed, and thoughtful Miss Felix’s desks and benches placed in it, along the walls. Mrs. Brooks sent an old white muslin dress to be made into window-curtains, and Martin spent a whole day in forming a little platform out of boards, on which, when covered with green baize, the teacher’s table and chair were to rest.
Even Elinor’s sick-chamber assumed a different aspect. One day, when Mr. Brooks was in the village on business, he stepped into a paper-hanger’s, and chose a cheap, but pretty paper for the lime-washed wall. It was very cheerful-looking, being formed of alternate stripes of white and rose-color; “for,” said the farmer, when he reached home, “I warrant Miss Elinor grows tired of seeing the same cracks in the plaster, year in and year out. She must have something new and gay, like this, that will help to keep her spirits up!”
Mrs. Harrow and the farmer’s wife pasted this paper on the walls themselves, with a little assistance from Nelly, who stood ready to lift benches, hand the scissors back and forth, and give any other slight aid of which she was capable.
The house was only one-story high, with a garret, so Elinor’s room had a slanting roof and a dormer window. Mrs. Brooks said it would be a great improvement, if the striped paper were pasted on the ceiling too, and joined in the peak with a wood-colored border resembling a heavy cord or rope. This made the place look, when it was done, like a pink canvas tent. The change was wonderful. An imitation of a pair of tassels of the same color and style as the rope border, which the paper-hanger, hearing of the design, sent to the house as a present to Miss Elinor, when pasted carefully at each end of the peak, against the wall, made the illusion perfect.
Elinor said she lived in the Tent of Kindness.
The neighbors who came in to inspect all these preparations, said Elinor’s was the very prettiest dormer-room they had ever seen. There was enough left of the old dress to curtain the single window, which being done, everything was at last pronounced to be in a state of readiness.
And now we must go back to Nelly, who, I suppose, some of my readers remember, is the adopted daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Brooks. Nelly had known much sorrow in her short life, as will be seen on reference to the little story called “Nelly and her Friends.” She had never experienced what it was to be loved by father and mother till now; and when the farmer and his wife began to teach her to call them by those sacred titles, she felt herself a very happy little girl. She was delighted at the prospect of attending school. She had never been to one, and, therefore, perhaps, the novelty of the thing was half the attraction.
When the important day arrived, and the child found herself seated in the class-room with twelve or fourteen other little folks, she was filled with awe and dismay, so much so, that she scarcely dared turn around to take a good look at her next neighbor, a girl of twelve, in the shy dread that she might be caught in the act, which circumstance would, doubtless, have occasioned her much confusion.
Miss Harrow did not give her pupils any lessons to learn this first morning. She said, as no one had books, it should be a day of pleasure and not of work, and on the morrow they would begin to study in earnest.
So, during the whole morning, the children drew funny little pictures on slips of paper, which were handed them for the purpose of amusing them; and in the afternoon, the teacher made them pull their benches close to the fire, in cosy rows, while she told them stories.