"There was Mis' Trowbridge's banquet lamp that her children got for a prize, sellin' Magic Soap (and there ain't much magic in it, I can tell you that, unless you mix consid'able elbow grease with it!); I thought it was real good in the Trowbridge children to lend that lamp, for it's the only namable stick o' furniture they've got in the room they call their parlor, and they set great store by it. They'd never lighted it up 'cause they couldn't afford karosene, but anyway Mis' Trowbridge never read a book in her life, I guess, and Dan Trowbridge goes to bed at sundown; Salomy Trowbridge--she's the fourteen-year-old girl--never took her eyes off the lamp the whole evening, and once when it kind o' flared up, and she thought it was goin' to scorch the pink shade, she went right up on the platform and turned it down so't the author couldn't hardly see to read. Almiry Berry's reflecting lamp was on the stage, too, and hanging from it was an ear o' corn gilded, with a thermometer let in where some o' the kernels was took out--it looked real kind o' cute! Widow Buzzell's wicker chair and walnut table set in the centre, and if she hadn't bronzed up the chair with Diamond Paint so't nobody recognized it! Diadema Bascom's foreroom rug was on the floor, and my Batterbug lace tidies on the pulpit chairs. My lunge stood in the back with an African over it, and a couple of sofy-pillows stood up on end. What the Perkins girl wanted it there for beats me, for no author that I ever see would lay down while she was readin', and after it's over she'd be glad to go home and go to bed, I should think. I didn't like it a mite that Miss Perkins put the African over it, for we'd just had it new covered with emmanuel cloth and it looked real handsome and shiny; Si's awful fond of lungeing, and I thought I'd buy something this time he _couldn't_ lunge out! Well, if you have a decoratin' committee I s'pose you've got to give 'em their heads and let 'em decorate; so I didn't say nothin' to Miss Perkins. "On the piano was my marble statue of Abraham Lincoln, and Mis' Emerson's pair of tall vases that Huldy Packard sent her from Indiana. Miss Perkins had filled 'em full of goldenrod, but when Judge Thomson come and seen 'em standin' on his wife's new upright pianer he said he couldn't have that nohow; so when the audience was seatin', and before the Readin' began, Miss Perkins had to empty the water out o' the vases and stick peacock feathers in 'em; and then when the author come her cousin was with her, and she didn't like the peacock feathers 'cause they was unlucky; so poor Miss Perkins hove 'em out the winder and set the vases on the pianer upside down. They're awful hombly, anyway, and they look 'bout as well empty as full, an' standin' 'em bottomside up don't hurt the pattern any.