That night a mysterious letter was written, the two dollars slipped in, sealed, and directed, ready to give to the postman, an old man who passed every day with mail for the village.
Never did ten days seem so long to Lottie as that particular ten days which passed before she got her answer. Every day, at the postman’s hour, she ran up to the road and waited for him, all the time planning the wonderful things she would do. At last, one day, the old man stopped his horse, fumbled in his saddlebags, and brought out a package directed to her.
She seized it, and ran off to open her treasure. What did the package contain? Nothing but twenty-eight china dolls, some silver and gilt paper, and some bits of bright silk.
“Auntie has got everything!” she exclaimed joyfully; “and now I can go right to work.”
Now the log house had but four rooms,—the living-room, where they ate, and where old Nancy cooked at a big cave of a fireplace, in which logs were burning from fall to spring; the girls’ room, where May lay, which was also warmed by a big fireplace; father’s room, and a room in the attic for Nancy.
Lottie could not work in the cold, nor in May’s room, so she established herself in a warm corner of the living-room, far enough from Nancy’s dull eyes, and near a window. Day after day she worked, making excuses to May for leaving her so much alone, and hiding her work before her father came in at night.
I will tell you how she made the set of chessmen. First she hunted up a smooth, thin board, from which she cut, with her father’s saw, a square piece about twenty inches square. The middle of this board she laid out in blocks with a pencil and ruler, careful to make them exactly perfect. The blocks were two inches square and there were eight each way; in fact, it was a copy of the chessboard her father had made.
These squares she covered with gilt and silver paper alternately, covering the joinings with strips of very narrow gilt bordering. The edge of the board she covered with a strip of drab-colored cloth she found in the piece-trunk.
The board being finished,—and it was really very pretty,—she had next to make the chessmen. For these she used the china dolls, the tallest of which was three inches high. Half of the dolls were white and the other half black; the white to wear blue and white, the black ones scarlet and drab.
The dressing was a work of art, for she wished to make them look like the characters they represented. She looked through the picture-books in the house to see how kings and queens and knights and bishops were dressed. Pictures of kings and queens she found in a geography, knights in a volume of Shakespeare, and a bishop in an odd number of an old magazine.