A tree is one of the nicest play-houses a person can have. But suppose it is a rainy day! We will play it _is_ a rainy day, and we will go and go until we get to a house with a steep roof. And we will go in, and go upstairs, and then upstairs again until we get to a garret, where we can see the rafters sloping to the ridge over our heads, and the inside of the shingles. On the floor are trunks and boxes and barrels, and all sorts of things are hanging from the rafters. Sometimes we hear the pigeons running on the outsides of the shingles and cooing under the eaves. It is a lonely sound. It is rather dark, too, but we are brave, and we get past two saddles, and a row of white petticoats, and a dim place where there are a lot of old books with strange dark pictures in them, which one likes to be sure are shut in tight. At last we get round a corner and find a gable with a pointed window, and there is a play-house where a little girl and eight dolls live. There are four rooms in the play-house, though if you are not thinking, you may very likely walk right through the walls and not know it. On one side of the window is a bedroom, and on the other side is the kitchen. The dining room and the living room are in the corners nearest the rest of the garret. The little girl's big sister put up some pictures on the sloping wooden walls to suit each room. One of them is very useful when the little girl is deciding what to play. It is seven little pictures on a card with verses to explain them. You can read the verses at the beginning of this chapter; I am sorry the pictures are not there, too. This little girl likes especially to play "Monday, I wash my dollies' clothes"--because she has a tub and a washboard, and a wringer that will really let buttons through, and clothespins and a clothes-horse, and all the garret to put up lines in. Housework, you know, is so much more fun if you have the right things to do it with. "Tuesday, I neatly press them," is a good day, too, but "Wednesday, I mend their little hose," is not. One cannot sit still and make believe sew, for many minutes. When mother was told about this trouble, she looked at the pictures and said, "Why, there's no sweeping day! As soon as the stockings are mended on Wednesday, you had better sweep, and tidy things up a little." Mother often wants things "tidied up" when it isn't in the game. She says, she does not keep her little girl's hat on the dining table, nor leave her bed unmade, and she cannot have the dolls brought up that way either.