After I had made a dash at and captured my book, I seated myself with difficulty on the edge of the chest of drawers, and was soon lost in an Esquimaux hut.  Presently, in crossing my feet, my shoes, which were large, dropped on the painted floor with a loud noise.  I looked at my aunt; her regards were still fixed upon me, but they did not interfere with her occupation of knitting; neither did they interrupt her habit of chewing cloves, flagroot, or grains of rice.  If these articles were not at hand, she chewed a small chip.

“Aunt Merce, poor Hepburn chewed his shoes, when he was in Davis’s Straits.”

“Mary, look at that child’s stockings.”

Mother raised her eyes from the Boston Recorder, and the article she had been absorbed in the proceedings of an Ecclesiastical Council, which had discussed (she read aloud to Aunt Merce) the conduct of Brother Thaddeus Turner, pastor of the Congregational Church of Hyena.  Brother Thaddeus had spoken lightly of the difference between Sprinkling and Immersion, and had even called Hyena’s Baptist minister “Brother.”  He was contumacious at first, was Brother Thaddeus, but Brother Boanerges from Andover finally floored him.

“Cassandra,” said mother, presently, “come here.”

I obeyed with reluctance, making a show of turning down a leaf.

“Child,” she continued, and her eyes wandered over me dreamily, till they dropped on my stockings; “why will you waste so much time on unprofitable stories?”

“Mother, I hate good stories, all but the Shepherd of Salisbury Plain; I like that, because it makes me hungry to read about the roasted potatoes the shepherd had for breakfast and supper.  Would it make me thankful if you only gave me potatoes without salt?”

“Not unless your heart is right before God.”

“‘The Lord my Shepherd is,’” sang Aunt Merce.

I put my hands over my ears, and looked defiantly round the room.  Its walls are no longer standing, and the hands of its builders have crumbled to dust.  Some mental accident impressed this picture on the purblind memory of childhood.

We were in mother’s winter room.  She was in a low, chintz-covered chair; Aunt Merce sat by the window, in a straight-backed chair, that rocked querulously, and likewise covered with chintz, of a red and yellow pattern.  Before the lower half of the windows were curtains of red serge, which she rattled apart on their brass rods, whenever she heard a footstep, or the creak of a wheel in the road below.  The walls were hung with white paper, through which ran thread-like stripes of green.  A square of green and chocolate-colored English carpet covered the middle of the floor, and a row of straw chairs stood around it, on the bare, lead-colored boards.  A huge bed, with a chintz top shaped like an elephant’s back, was in one corner, and a six-legged mahogany table in another.  One side of the room where the fireplace was set was paneled in wood; its fire had burned down in the shining Franklin stove, and broken brands were standing upright.  The charred backlog still smoldered, its sap hissed and bubbled at each end.