The morning after his return from his voyage, Persis, passing her brother, would be arrested by an inarticulate command, and would pause while he dragged out his old leather bag, heavy with his hard-earned coins. Then Persis would hold up her apron by the two lower corners, and he would pour in a goodly portion of his wealth, while his face looked more smiling and animated than she ever saw it at any other time. “’Twill buy you something as good as anybody when you go among the grand folk,” he would say, with a half-chuckle, when Persis thanked him. Sarah Buckley hid away all this money for Persis in the till of the chest. “It will come handy some day,” she would remark, with a meaning smile. This fund was not drawn upon for the purchase of Persis’s daily needs and luxuries. Her father’s earnings and her mother’s thrift provided them, and with seemingly little stint. People said that the materials for Persis Buckley’s crewel-work alone cost a pretty sum. After she had finished her sampler she worked a mourning-piece, and after that a great picture, all in cross-stitch, which was held to be a marvel. Persis’s very soul flagged over the house and the green trees, the river, and the red rose-bushes, and the blue sky, all wrought with her needle, stitch by stitch. Once in the depths of her docile heart a sudden wish, which seemed as foreign to her as an impious spirit, leaped up that all this had never been created, since she was forced to reproduce it in cross-stitch. “I wish,” said Persis, quite out loud to herself when she was all alone in the front room--“I wish the trees had never been made, nor the roses, nor the river, nor the sky; then I shouldn’t have had to work them.” Then she fairly trembled at her wickedness, and counted the stitches in a corner of the sky with renewed zeal and faithfulness. When Persis was sixteen, her mother, in her anxiety to provide her with accomplishments, went a step beyond all previous efforts, and a piano was bought for her. It was the very first piano which had ever come to this little seaport town. Ichabod had commissioned a sea-captain to purchase it in England. When it was set up on its slender fluted legs in the Buckley front room, all the people came and craved permission to see it, and viewed its satiny surface and inlaid-work in mother-of-pearl with admiration and awe. Then they went away, and discoursed among themselves as to the folly and sinful extravagance of Ichabod Buckley and his wife.