Nor were their happy hearts less valuable in the house than their helpful hands. Half the mother's load of care melted from her in the brightness of their faces, and the anxious cloud on Mr. Christopher Willian's brow lightened in spite of him whenever some gushing sprite, all laughter and kisses, ran to welcome him home. He was sometimes vexed on recollecting how he had been lured from a good grumble by their baby wiles. Indeed, he was not nearly so dissatisfied as he pretended to be. Such sweet and healthy affections as theirs were, which, never having been checked, flowed out in joyous innocence; such pure, unerring instincts, that needed no knowledge of baseness in order to shrink from its contact; such open hands for the poor, such tender hands for the afflicted; and, crowning all, such steadfast, unassuming piety. Among the young ladies who, dressed to attract attention, promenaded the public streets, the Willian girls were never found; their father's house was the place where they made new acquaintances and entertained old ones. And what did they conceal from their parents? Nothing. Their hopes and plans and fears, their mistakes, their faults, all were freely told. And how pretty they were! Their father secretly made the most flowery comparisons when looking at them. He mentally challenged the dew-washed morning roses and violets to vie with their fresh faces around the breakfast table. When at evening they formed a ring of bloom around the piano, and sang for their parents, or for visitors, his private opinion was, that a choir of angels could not far excel them; and when the circle broke, like a wreath falling into flowers, and each went about some pretty employment, then Mr. Willian had not eyes enough with which to watch his seven girls. But once own to any such feeling, and there would be an end to his privilege of grumbling. He well knew what a chorus would assail his first grievance: "Why, papa, you said that we were—" etc.; or, "Now, Mr. Willian, do be consistent! With my own ears I have heard you say—" etc. So he wrapped the silver lining of his cloud inward, and showed them only the gray.
But one evening, for a wonder, he came home with a joyful face and no word of fault-finding. When Jenny, the youngest, ran to meet him, he gave her a toss nearly to the ceiling; he gave one of Fanny's curls a pull in passing her; he presented his wife with a bunch of late flowers, he praised every thing on the supper-table. Finally, when they were gathered in the evening, he told them the cause of this unusual hilarity. He had that day made the last payment on the building in which he had his shop, and now their weary economies were at an end.
"But don't imagine, you young witches, that all this is to go in finery," he said, giving the nearest one a pinch on the cheek. "The house here needs a little fitting up, and perhaps we will have a new piano. But I must begin now to lay by something. A man with such a load of girls on his shoulders has to think of the future."
They were too much accustomed to remarks like the last to be greatly disturbed by them, but this threw a momentary dampening. Then the silence was broken by Miss Eva's calm and musical voice: "The house needs to be painted and papered and furnished from basement to attic. It is very shabby."
Mr. Willian forgot to exclaim at the dimensions of this proposition when he looked in the fair face of his eldest daughter, and saw the serene grace with which she seated herself beside her mother, and smoothed down the folds of her dress. Eva was now twenty, calm, blonde, and stately.
"O papa!" cried Florence across the fireplace; "do buy a lovely landscape of Weber's we saw to-day. It is just what we want to put over the mantel-piece in the front parlor." Again the father looked, but said nothing.
Florence was a girl of artistic tastes, was frail and excitable, and had brilliant violet eyes and an unsteady scarlet in her cheeks.
"Now at last I can have a watch!" cried Frances in a ringing voice. "I've nearly got a curvature of the spine from looking round at the clock to see if I have practised long enough."
"My dear Fanny," interposed her mother, "we need a new set of china much more than you need a watch."