CHAPTER X.
PLEASURE AND DISAPPOINTMENT.
THE day came at last when the front room at the Deckers was put in order. I don't suppose you have any idea how pretty that room looked when the last tack was driven, and the last fold in the curtain twitched into place! The rag carpet was very bright. "I put a good many red and yellows in it," said Mrs. Smith, "and now I know why I did it. It is just bright enough for this room. I don't see how you two could have got it down as firm as you have."
"Nettie managed it," said Mrs. Decker, "she is a master hand at putting down carpets."
The furniture was done and in place, and certainly did justice to the manufacturers. There were two "sofas" with backs which were so nicely padded that they were very comfortable things to lean against, and the gay-flowered goods that had looked "so horrid" in a dress that Mrs. Smith could never bring herself to wear it, proved to be just the thing for a sofa-cover. Between the windows was a very marvel of a table. Nobody certainly to look at it, draped in the whitest of muslin, with a pink cambric band around its waist, covered with the muslin, and looking as much like pink ribbon as possible, would have imagined that a square post, about six inches in diameter, and two feet long, with a barrel head securely nailed to each end, was the "skeleton" out of which all this prettiness was evolved. "And mine is as like it as two peas," said Mrs. Smith, "only mine is tied with blue ribbon. Who would have thought such things could be made out of what they had to work with! I declare them two young things beat all!" This time she meant Nettie and Jerry, not the two tables.
The curtains for which, after much consideration, cheap unbleached muslin had been chosen, when their pinkish lambrequins of the same gay-flowered goods as the sofas, had been cut and scalloped, and put in place, were almost pretty enough to justify the extravagant admiration which they called forth. But the crowning glory was, after all, a chair which occupied the broad space between the window and the door. It was cushioned, back, and sides, and arms; it was dressed in a robe which had belonged to Job Smith's grandmother. It was delightful to look at, and delightful to sit in. Mrs. Decker declared that the first time she sat down in it, she felt more rested than she had in three years.
Those two barrel chairs were triumphs of art. Jerry had been a week over the first one, planning, trying, failing, trying again; Nettie had seen one once, in the room of a house where she used to go sometimes to carry flowers to a sick woman. She had admired it very much, and the lady herself had told her how it was made, and that her nephew, a boy of sixteen, made it for her. Now, although Jerry was not a boy of sixteen, he had no idea there lived one of that age who could accomplish anything which he could not; so he persevered, and I must say his success was complete. Mrs. Smith believed there never was such a wonderful chair made, before.
Jerry who had been missing for the last half-hour, now appeared, and with long strides reached the nice little mantel and set thereon a lamp, not very large, but new and bright.