Aunt Jimmy's Will

by Mabel Osgood Wright

January was half over before it was possible for the Lanes to take their long-promised trip to New York to look up Bird and bring her back, as her uncle had exacted, a legal sister to Lammy.

Moving from the small house into the large one, even though the necessary repairs were to be made by degrees, was more of an undertaking than Mrs. Lane had bargained for. Also it took Lammy a long time to get “the bones back in his legs,” though happiness and Dr. Jedd’s tonics worked wonders.

Dr. Jedd had suggested that a furnace required much less care than three or four stoves, and so one had been put in. Mrs. Jedd, who had very good taste, and a tactful way of expressing it that never gave offence, suggested to Mrs. Lane that, instead of covering the mahogany parlour set with red plush, the floor with a red-figured tapestry brussels, replacing the small window-panes with great sheets of glass, bricking up the wide fireplace, and then closing the whole room up except, as Joshua said, for funerals, it should be turned into a comfortable living-room.

This suited Joshua, the older boys, and Lammy exactly, and though Lauretta Ann demurred at first, saying, “It didn’t seem hardly respectable not to hev a best room,” she quickly yielded, and said that it “would be a real comfort to have a separate place to eat in when there was a lot of baking on hand and the kitchen all of a tousle, likewise to set in after meals.”

So the old furniture was recovered with a suitable dull green corduroy, and some comfortable Morris chairs added, “that pa and the boys wouldn’t be tempted to set back on the hind legs of the mahogany, which is brittle.” A deep red rug, that would not have to be untacked at housecleaning times, covered the centre of the floor, with Grandmother Lane’s long Thanksgiving dinner-table in the centre, and a smaller round one with folding leaves in the corner, for the entertaining of the friends who were constantly dropping in for a chat and a cup of tea and crullers or a cut of mince pie, for no one in the county had such a reputation for crullers and mince meat, combined with a lavish use of them, as Lauretta Ann Lane.

Next Mrs. Jedd ventured to suggest that the fireplace be left open and some of the big logs, with which Aunt Jimmy had always kept the woodshed filled, simply because her mother had done so before her, used for a nightly hearth fire.

Mrs. Lane said she hadn’t any andirons and the ashes would make dust, but Joshua was so pleased with the idea of returning to old ways that she yielded; and when, on the old fire-board being removed to clean the chimney of soot and swallows’ nests, a pair of tall andirons and a fender were found, the matter settled itself, and Mrs. Lane soon came to take pride in the cheerful blaze, while the best dishes, which were of really handsome blue and white India porcelain, were ranged in racks over the mantel-shelf.

Then there was a sunny southwest window, and Joshua fastened a long shelf in front of this for his wife’s geraniums, wax-plant, and wandering Jew that had shut out the light from the best window in the kitchen, and these brought in the welcome touch of greenery in spite of the particoloured crimped paper with which she insisted upon decorating the pots.

“How Bird will love this room!” Lammy said a dozen times a day, as he remembered how prettily she had arranged the scanty furnishings at the house above the crossroads, and disliked everything that savoured of show or cheap finery, and it seemed to him that Bird’s companionship was the only thing necessary to prove that heaven, instead of being a far-away region, at least had a branch at the fruit farm in Laurelville.