The long brush was hard to manage. However, she remembered the rhyme, "Try, try, try again;" and she worked away until she thought she had got the tint.
VI.
At last Bessie was ready to begin her great work. So, standing on tiptoe, she applied the brush to the upper-lip. She was determined, while she was about it, to give Col. Fraser a thoroughly good mustache, long and thick.
Now and then she would step back a little way, and consider the picture from a distance, as she had seen her uncle do. She was well pleased with her work. It was certainly a great improvement: so Bessie thought.
At last she laid down her brush. She felt quite charmed with her success, and picked up her doll off the floor, that she might see how well her little mamma could paint.
VII.
"It is beautiful! Is it not, Cornelia?" she said, as she threw herself back in the chair. "Uncle will never say again that I cannot paint. Perhaps it is more blue than Col. Fraser's mustache; but it is all the prettier for that."
Bessie remembered, too, that her mamma had once read to her a story about a man with a blue beard. "So people do have blue mustaches sometimes," thought she.