We and the World: A Book for Boys. Part I

by Juliana Horatia Ewing

Jem danced with delight when I put the wood-lice in and put on the lid.

“I hope she’ll shake the box before she opens it,” I said, as we replaced it on the dressing-table.

“I hope she will, or they won’t be tight. Oh, Jack! Jack! How many do you suppose she takes at a time?”

We never knew, and what is more, we never knew what became of the wood-lice, for, for some reason, she kept our counsel as well as her own about the pill-box.

One thing that helped to reconcile us to spending a good share of our summer days in Walnut-tree Academy was that the school-mistress made us very comfortable. Boys at our age are not very sensitive about matters of taste and colour and so forth, but

even we discovered that Mrs. Wood had that knack of adapting rooms to their inhabitants, and making them pleasant to the eye, which seems to be a trick at the end of some people’s fingers, and quite unlearnable by others. When she had made the old miser’s rooms to her mind, we might have understood, if we had speculated about it, how it was that she had not profited by my mother’s sound advice to send all his “rubbishy odds and ends” (the irregularity and ricketiness and dustiness of which made my mother shudder) to be “sold at the nearest auction-rooms, and buy some good solid furniture of the cabinet-maker who furnished for everybody in the neighbourhood, which would be the cheapest in the long-run, besides making the rooms look like other people’s at last.” That she evaded similar recommendations of paperhangers and upholsterers, and of wall-papers and carpets, and curtains with patterns that would “stand,” and wear best, and show dirt least, was a trifle in the eyes of all good housekeepers, when our farming-man’s daughter brought the amazing news with her to Sunday tea, that “the missus” had had in old Sally, and had torn the paper off the parlour, and had made Sally “lime-wash the walls, for all the world as if it was a cellar.” Moreover, she had “gone over” the lower part herself, and was now painting on the top of that. There was nothing for it, after this news, but to sigh

and conclude that there was something about the old place which made everybody a little queer who came to live in it.

But when Jem and I saw the parlour (which was now the school-room), we decided that it “looked very nice,” and was “uncommonly comfortable.” The change was certainly amazing, and made the funeral day seem longer ago than it really was. The walls were not literally lime-washed; but (which is the same thing, except for a little glue!) they were distempered, a soft pale pea-green. About a yard deep above the wainscot this was covered with a dark sombre green tint, and along the upper edge of this, as a border all round the room, the school-mistress had painted a trailing wreath of white periwinkle. The border was painted with the same materials as the walls, and with very rapid touches. The white flowers were skilfully relieved by the dark ground, and the varied tints of the leaves, from the deep evergreen of the old ones to the pale yellow of the young shoots, had demanded no new colours, and were wonderfully life-like and pretty. There was another border, right round the top of the room; but that was painted on paper and fastened on. It was a Bible text—“Keep Innocency, and take heed to the thing that is right, for that shall bring a man Peace at the last.” And Mrs. Wood had done the text also.

There were no curtains to the broad, mullioned window, which was kept wide open at every lattice; and one long shoot of ivy that had pushed in farther than the rest had been seized, and pinned to the wall inside, where its growth was a subject of study and calculation, during the many moments when we were “trying to see” how little we could learn of our lessons. The black-board stood on a polished easel; but the low seats and desks were of plain pine like the floor, and they were scrupulously scrubbed. The cool tint of the walls was somewhat cheered by coloured maps and prints, and the school-mistress’s chair (an old carved oak one that had been much revived by bees-wax and turpentine since the miser’s days) stood on the left-hand side of the window—under “Keep Innocency,” and looking towards “Peace at the last.” I know, for when we were all writing or something of that sort, so that she could sit still, she used to sit with her hands folded and look up at it, which was what made Jem and me think of the old white hen that turned up its eyes; and made Horace Simpson say that he believed she had done one of the letters wrong, and could not help looking at it to see if it showed. And by the school-mistress’s chair was the lame boy’s sofa. It was the very old sofa covered with newspapers on which I had read about the murder, when the lawyer was reading the

will. But she had taken off the paper, and covered it with turkey red, and red cushions, and a quilt of brown holland and red bordering, to hide his crumpled legs, so that he looked quite comfortable.