Like most high-spirited men, when father does get down into the depths he tries to burrow clear on through to China. I wonder why this is? Possibly it is on the same principle that effervescent drugs are kept in blue bottles. I do not blame him, certainly, for rheumatism is enough to get on anybody's nerves. The poor man has to try as many different positions to get any ease sometimes as a worn-out alarm clock that will run only on a certain side. So the summer has been a hard one for us all, father waxing so melancholy here lately that if he has a gum-boil he gives us directions for his cremation.
It was during one of these outbursts of pessimism that father took it into his head to disfigure the landscape across the road from our house with a row of smart cottages, which were to rent for so much a month that they would prove a get-rich-quick scheme and so save us from the humiliation of being cared for by the Masons in our old age, which was another one of the notions in the train of rheumatic gloom.
Fortunately the first cottage cost so much more than it was worth that the project for the rest was abandoned; and, after it was duly insured, mother and I were secretly burning candles to our patron saint for its incineration when it was rented to a family named Sullivan. This Sullivan family consists of a father who drinks, just a little, enough to keep him jolly all the time; a mother who is of such a despondent nature that you wish she would drink; a daughter who wears crimson silk gowns and jeweled combs to the post-office when she goes for her mail every morning, yet withal has more beaus than any other girl in the village, as is attested by the candy boxes piled piano-high in her parlor; and a maiden aunt, Miss Delia Badger, who dyes her hair. Now, this term, "maiden aunt," is usually employed to denote a condition of hopelessness, but you will understand from the dyed hair that, in this case, the condition is far from being hopeless—else why the dye?
The pristine blackness of Miss Delia's crown of glory was beginning to wear off, and in the stress of moving had not been replaced as soon as it should have been, so, on the day that I made her acquaintance, her hair displayed an iridescent sheen, shading from light tan to deep purple. This made me so angry with father for having built the cottage that I ran past him without a word of sympathy when I reached home, although he was sitting on the front porch reading the paper and making horrible faces every time he had to move his arm.
The next day, which was the second after their moving, when I turned in at our gate after my morning tramp, I found that the Sullivans were presenting a much more homelike view from the front of their house, elaborate curtains showing at the parlor windows, and at the front door a white panel of lace, a most lifelike affair, representing Andrew Jackson mounted upon his fiery steed and lifting his high white hat to an imaginary, though evidently enthusiastic, throng.
"Now, I reckon you're satisfied," I exclaimed to father as I came into the house and found him cleaning his gun, one end of it resting on the piano, and a pile of greasy rags perilously close to my limp-backed copy of Gray's Elegy.
He quickly moved the gun and rags, but seeing that this offense was not the cause of my wrath, he meekly inquired: "What?"
Mother came in at this juncture and I explained to them my indignation over the Andrew Jackson.
"Jumping Jerusalem!" father said, thus admitting his horrified surprise, but after a moment he parried.