II

CHRONICLES OF A CRAFTSMAN

Mrs. Budlong’s campaign was undertaken with the same farsightedness as a magazine editor’s.  On or about the Fourth of July she began to worry and plan.  By the second week in August she had her tatting well under way.  By the middle of September she was getting in her embroidered doilies.  The earliest frost rarely surprised her with her quilts untufted.  And when the first snow flew, her sachet bags were all stuffed and smelly.

She was very feminine in her sense of the value of her own time.  At missionary meetings she would shed tears over the pathetic pictures of Oriental women who spent a year weaving a rug which would sell for a paltry hundred dollars and last a mere century or two.  Then she would cheerfully devote fifteen days of incessant stitching at something she carried round in a sort of drumhead.  At the end of that time she would have completed a more or less intolerable piece of colored fabric which she called a “drape” or a “throw.”  It could not be duplicated at a shop for less than $1.75, and it would wash perhaps three times.

Mr. Budlong once figured that if sweat-shop proprietors paid wages at the scale Mrs. Budlong established for herself, all the seamstresses and seamsters would curl up round their machines and die of starvation the first week.  But he never told Mrs. Budlong this.  Fancy stitching did not earn much, but it did not cost much; and it kept her mysteriously contented.  She was stitching herself to her own home all the time.

The Christmas presents Mrs. Budlong made herself were not all a matter of needle and thread.  Not at all!  One year she turned her sewing room into a smithy.  She gave Mr. and Mrs. Doctor Tisnower the loveliest hand-hammered brass coal scuttle that ever was seen—­and with a purple ribbon tied to its tail.  They kept flowers in it several summers, till one cruel winter a new servant put coal in it and completely scuttled it.

The same year she gave Mrs. ex-Mayor Cinnamon a hammered brass version of a C. D. Gibson drawing.  The lady and gentleman looked as if they had broken out with a combination of yellow fever and smallpox, or suffered from enlarged pores or something.  And the plum-colored plush frame didn’t sit very well on the vermilion wall paper.  But Mrs. Cinnamon hung it over the sofa in the expectation of changing the paper some day.  It stayed there until the fateful evening when Mr. Nelson Chur called on Miss Editha Cinnamon and was just warming up a proposal that had held over almost as long as the wall paper, when bang! down came the overhanging brass drawing and bent itself hopelessly on Mr. Chur’s skull.  Mr. Chur said something that may have been Damocles.  But he did not propose, and Mrs. Budlong was weeks wondering why Mrs. Cinnamon was so snippy to her.

The hammered brass era gave way to the opposite extreme of painted velvet.  They say it is a difficult art; and it may well be.  Mrs. Budlong’s first landscape might as well have been painted on the side of her Scotch collie.