CHAPTER XVII.

An old song evening.

Aunt Sarah and Mary spent few idle moments while carrying out their plans for “doing over” the old parlor.  Finally, ’twas finished.  Mary breathed a sigh of satisfaction as the last picture was hung on the wall.  She turned to her Aunt, saying, “Don’t you think the room looks bright, cheery and livable?”

“Yes,” replied her Aunt, “and what is more essential, homey, I have read somewhere, ’A woman’s house should be as personal a matter as a spider’s web or a snail’s shell; and all the thought, toil and love she puts into it should be preserved a part of its comeliness and homelikeness forever, and be her monument to the generations.’”

“Well, Aunt Sarah,” replied Mary, “I guess we’ve earned our monument.  The air that blows over the fields, wafted in from the open window, is sweet with the scent of grain and clover, and certainly is refreshing.  I’m dreadfully tired, but so delighted with the result of our labors.  Now we will go and ‘make ready,’ as Sibylla says, before the arrival of Ralph from the city.  I do hope the ice cream will be frozen hard.  The Sunshine Sponge Cake, which I baked from a recipe the Professor’s wife gave me, is light as a feather.  ’Tis Ralph’s favorite cake.  Let’s see; besides Ralph there are coming all the Schmidts, Lucy Robbins, the school teacher, and Sibylla entertains her Jake in the kitchen.  I promised to treat him to ice cream; Sibylla was so good about helping me crack the ice to use for freezing the cream.  We shall have an ’Old Song Evening’ that will amuse every one.”

Quite early, as is the custom in the country, the guests for the evening arrived; and both Mary and Aunt Sarah felt fully repaid for their hard work of the past weeks by the pleasure John Landis evinced at the changed appearance of the room.

The Professor’s wife said, “It scarcely seems possible to have changed the old room so completely.”

Aunt Sarah replied, “Paint and paper do wonders when combined with good taste, furnished by Mary.”

During the evening one might have been forgiven for thinking Professor Schmidt disloyal to the Mother Country (he having been born and educated in Heidelberg) had you overheard him speaking to Ralph on his favorite subject, the “Pennsylvania German.”  During a lull in the general conversation in the room Mary heard the Professor remark to Ralph:  “The Pennsylvania Germans are a thrifty, honest and industrious class of people, many of whom have held high offices.  The first Germans to come to America as colonists in Pennsylvania were, as a rule, well to do.  Experts, when examining old documents of Colonial days, after counting thousands of signatures, found the New York ‘Dutch’ and the Pennsylvania ‘Germans’ were above the average in education in those days.  Their dialect, the so-called ’Pennsylvania German’ or ‘Dutch,’ as it is erroneously called by many, is a dialect which we find from the Tauber Grund to Frankfurt, A.M.  As the German language preponderated among the early settlers, the language of different elements, becoming amalgamated, formed a class of people frequently called ’Pennsylvania Dutch’.”