Her most finished roses had something of the look of shaggy tarantulas that had fallen into a paint pot and emerged in a towering rage.  It was in that velvetolene stratum that she painted for the church a tasseled pulpit cloth that hung down a yard below the Bible.  Dr. Torpadie was a very soothing preacher, but no one slept o’sermons during the reign of that pulpit cloth.

Mrs. Budlong was so elated over the success of it, however, that she announced her intention of going in for stained glass.  She planned a series of the sweetest windows to replace those already in the church.  But she never got nearer to that than painted china.

The painted china era was a dire era.  The cups would break and the colors would run, and they never came out what she expected after they were fired.  Of course she knew that the pigments must suffer alteration in the furnace, but there was always a surprise beyond surprise.

She soon became accustomed to getting green roses with crimson leaves, and deep blue apple blossoms against a pure white sky, but when she finished one complete set of table china in fifty pieces, each cup and saucer with a flower on it, the result looked so startlingly like something from a medical museum, that she never dared give the set away.  She lent it to the cook to eat her meals on.  The set went fast.

During this epoch Master Ulysses Budlong Jr. was studying at school a physiology ornamented with a few pictures in color representing the stomachs of alcohol specialists.  They were intended, perhaps, to frighten little school children from frequenting saloons during recess, or to warn them not to put whisky on their porridge.

It was at this time that Mrs. Budlong spent two weeks’ hard labor painting Easter lilies on an umbrella jug.  When it came home from the furnace, her husband stared at it and mumbled: 

“It’s artistic, but what is it?”

Little Ulysses shrieked:  “Oh, I know!” and darting away, returned with his physiology opened at one of those gastric sunsets, and—­well, it was this that impelled Mrs. Budlong to a solemn pledge never to paint china again—­a pledge she has nobly kept.

From smeared china she went to that art in which a woman buys something at a store, pulls out half of it, and calls the remnant drawn work.  A season of this was succeeded by a mania for sofa cushions.  It fairly snowed sofa cushions all over Carthage that Christmas; and Yale, Harvard and Princeton pillows could be found in homes that had never known even a night school alumnus.

There ensued a sober period of burnt wood and a period of burnt leather, during which excited neighbors with a keen sense of smell called the fire department three times and the board of health once.  And now Indian heads broke out all over town and the walls looked as if a shoemaker’s apron had been chosen for the national pennant.

There were various other spasms of manufacture, each of them fashionable at its time and foolish at anytime.  As Mr. Detwiller said: