and tell me if ever you saw anything so enchanting in the whole course of your life before? Isn’t she big? Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she good? Just see her little hands and her hair! She never cries except when it is clearly her duty to cry. See her turn her head to look at me! Oh, you angel!” And seizing the long-suffering baby, she smothered it with kisses. “I never, never, never did see anything so sweet. Smell her, Katy! Doesn’t she smell like heaven?”
Little Rose was indeed a delicious baby, all dimples and good-humor and violet-powder, with a skin as soft as a lily’s leaf, and a happy capacity for allowing herself to be petted and cuddled without remonstrance. Katy wanted to hold her all the time; but this Rose would by no means permit; in fact, I may as well say at once that the two girls spent a great part of their time during the visit in fighting for the possession of the baby, who looked on at the struggle, and smiled on the victor, whichever it happened to be, with all the philosophic composure of Helen of Troy. She was so soft and sunny and equable, that it was no more trouble to care for and amuse her than if she had been a bird or a kitten; and, as Rose remarked, it was “ten times better fun”.
“I was never allowed as much doll as I wanted in my infancy,” she said. “I suppose I tore them to pieces too soon; and they couldn’t give me tin ones to play with, as they did washbowls when I broke the china ones.”
“Were you such a very bad child?” asked Katy.
“Oh, utterly depraved, I believe. You wouldn’t think so now, would you? I recollect some dreadful occasions at school. Once I had my head pinned up in my apron because I would make faces at the other scholars, and they laughed; but I promptly bit a bay-window through the apron, and ran my tongue out of it till they laughed worse than ever. The teacher used to send me home with notes fastened to my pinafore with things like this written in them: ‘Little Frisk has been more troublesome than usual today. She has pinched all the younger children, and bent the bonnets of all the older ones. We hope to see an amendment soon, or we do not know what we shall do’.”
“Why did they call you Little Frisk?” inquired Katy, after she had recovered from the laugh which Rose’s reminiscences called forth.
“It was a term of endearment, I suppose; but somehow my family never seemed to enjoy it as they ought. I cannot understand,” she went on reflectively, “why I had not sense enough to suppress those awful little notes. It would have been so easy to lose them on the way home, but somehow it never occurred to me. Little Rose will be wiser than that; won’t you, my angel? She will tear up the horrid notes—mammy will show her how!”
All the time that Katy was washing her face and brushing the dust of the railway from her dress, Rose sat by with the little Rose in her lap, entertaining her thus. When she was ready, the droll little Mamma tucked her baby under her arm and led the way downstairs to a large square parlor with a bay-window, through which the westering sun was shining. It was a pretty room, and had a flavor about it “just like Rose”, Katy declared. No one else would have hung the pictures or looped back the curtains in exactly that way, or have hit upon the happy device of filling the grate with a great bunch of marigolds, pale brown, golden, and orange, to simulate the fire, which would have been quite too warm on so mild an evening. Morris papers and chintzes and “artistic” shades of color were in their infancy at that date; but Rose’s taste was in advance of her time, and with a foreshadowing of the coming “reaction”, she had chosen a “greenery, yallery” paper for her walls, against which hung various articles which looked a great deal queerer then than they would today. There was a mandolin, picked up at some Eastern sale, a warming-pan in shining brass from her mother’s attic, two old samplers worked in faded silks, and a quantity of gayly tinted Japanese fans and embroideries. She had also begged from an old aunt at Beverly Farms a couple of droll little armchairs in white painted wood, with covers of antique needle-work. One had “Chit” embroidered on the middle of its cushion; the other, “Chat”. These stood suggestively at the corners of the hearth.
“Now, Katy,” said Rose, seating herself in “Chit”, “pull up ‘Chat’ and let us begin.”
So they did begin, and went on, interrupted only by Baby Rose’s coos and splutters, till the dusk fell, till appetizing smells floated through from the rear of the house, and the click of a latch-key announced Mr. Browne, come home just in time for dinner.
The two days’ visit went only too quickly. There is nothing more fascinating to a girl than the menage of a young couple of her own age. It is a sort of playing at real life without the cares and the sense of responsibility that real life is sure to bring. Rose was an adventurous housekeeper. She was still new to the position, she found it very entertaining, and she delighted in experiments of all sorts. If they turned out well, it was good fun; if not, that was funnier still! Her husband, for all his serious manner, had a real boy’s love of a lark, and he aided and abetted her in all sorts of whimsical devices. They owned a dog who was only less dear than the baby, a cat only less dear than the dog, a parrot whose education required constant supervision, and a hutch of ring-doves whose melancholy little “whuddering” coos were the delight of Rose. The house seemed astir with young life all over. The only elderly thing in it was the cook, who had the reputation of a dreadful temper; only, unfortunately, Rose made her laugh so much that she never found time to be cross.
Katy felt quite an old, experienced person amid all this movement and liveliness and cheer. It seemed to her that nobody in the world could possibly be having such a good time as Rose; but Rose did not take the same view of the situation.
“It’s all very well now,” she said, “while the warm weather lasts; but in winter Longwood is simply gruesome. The wind never stops blowing day nor night. It howls and it roars and it screams, till I feel as if every nerve in my body were on the point of snapping in two. And the snow, ugh! And the wind, ugh! And burglars! Every night of our lives they come—or I think they come—and I lie awake and hear them sharpening their tools and forcing the locks and murdering the cook and kidnapping Baby, till I long to die, and have done with them forever! Oh, Nature is the most unpleasant thing!”
“Burglars are not Nature,” objected Katy.
“What are they, then? Art? High Art? Well, whatever they are, I do not like them. Oh, if ever the happy day comes when Deniston consents to move into town, I never wish to set my eyes on the country again as long as I live, unless—well, yes, I should like to come out just once more in the horse-cars and kick that elm-tree by the fence! The number of times that I have lain awake at night listening to its creaking!”
“You might kick it without waiting to have a house in town.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t dare as long as we are living here! You never know what Nature may do. She has ways of her own of getting even with people,” remarked her friend, solemnly.
No time must be lost in showing Boston to Katy, Rose said. So the morning after her arrival she was taken in bright and early to see the sights. There were not quite so many sights to be seen then as there are today. The Art Museum had not got much above its foundations; the new Trinity Church was still in the future; but the big organ and the bronze statue of Beethoven were in their glory, and every day at high noon a small straggling audience wandered into Music Hall to hear the instrument played. To this extempore concert Katy was taken, and to Faneuil Hall and the Athenaeum, to Doll and Richards, where was an exhibition of pictures, to the Granary Graveyard, and the Old South. Then the girls did a little shopping; and by that time they were quite tired enough to make the idea of luncheon agreeable, so they took the path across the Common to the Joy Street Mall.
Katy was charmed by all she had seen. The delightful nearness of so many interesting things surprised her. She perceived what is one of Boston’s chief charms—that the Common and its surrounding streets make a natural centre and rallying-point for the whole city; as the heart is
