We and the World: A Book for Boys. Part IEwing, Juliana Horatia
General
We and the World: A Book for Boys. Part I
Ewing, Juliana Horatia
Sea stories
It was two days before the summer holidays came to an end that Charlie
asked me to come down to the farm and help him to put away his fern
collection and a lot of other things into the places that he had
arranged for them in his room; for now that the school-room was wanted
again, he could not leave his papers and boxes about there. Charlie
lived at the farm altogether now. He was better there than on the moors,
so he boarded there and went home for visits. The room Mrs. Wood had
given him was the one where the old miser had slept. In a memorandum
left with his will it appeared that he had expressed a wish that the
furniture of that room should not be altered, which was how they knew it
was his. So Mrs. Wood had kept the curious old oak bed (the back of
which was fastened into the wall), and an old oak press, with a great
number of drawers with brass handles to them, and all the queer
furniture that she found there, just as it was. Even the brass
warming-pan was only rubbed and put back in its place, and the big
bellows were duly hung up by the small fire-place. But everything was so
polished up and cleaned, the walls re-papered with a soft grey-green
paper spangled with dog-daisies, and the room so brightened up with
fresh blinds and bedclothes, and a bit of bright carpet, that it did
not look in the least dismal, and Charlie was very proud and very fond
of it. It had two windows, one where the beehive was, and one very sunny
one, where he had a balm of Gilead that Isaac's wife gave him, and his
old medicine-bottles full of cuttings on the upper ledge. The old women
used to send him "slippings" off their fairy roses and myrtles and
fuchsias, and they rooted very well in that window, there was so much
sun.
Charlie had only just begun a fern collection, and I had saved my
pocket-money (I did not want it for anything else) and had bought him
several quires of cartridge-paper; and Dr. Brown had given him a packet
of medicine-labels to cut up into strips to fasten his specimens in
with, and the collection looked very well and very scientific; and all
that remained was to find a good place to put it away in. The drawers of
the press were of all shapes and sizes, but there were two longish very
shallow ones that just matched each other, and when I pulled one of them
out, and put the fern-papers in, they fitted exactly, and the drawer
just held half the collection. I called Charlie to look, and he hobbled
up on his crutches and was delighted, but he said he should like to put
the others in himself, so I got him into a chair, and shut up the full
drawer and pulled out the empty one, and went down-stairs for the two
moleskins we were curing, and the glue-pot, and the toffy-tin, and some
other things that had to be cleared out of the school-room now the
holidays were over.
When I came back the fern-papers were still outside, and Charlie was
looking flushed and cross.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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