Roberta was a very amiable child, but old Squire said she “wuz techus erbout sum things.”  And the old clock must have been one of the things.

The chairs were brought from Virginia on the backs of mules, and the covers on them embroidered by the little girl’s grandmother.  The same busy hands that superintended the manufacture of those piles of linen sheets stored away in the presses above stairs, and the counterpanes woven with the American eagle in the center, bunches of hollyhocks and sweet pea in the corners, and trumpet vines running along the edges.

The paper on the walls of the parlor was a curiosity.  It was imported from England many, many years before Roberta’s mother was born, because her grandfather saw a room somewhere, I think in Baltimore, that had similar paper, and he took such a fancy to it he ordered some from the same place.  The paper was wrought in great panels, with life-size figures of orientals in the center.  They were terrible looking men, the children thought.  They had swarthy skins and beards down to their waists, and fierce eyes that flashed out beneath their turbans with a fe-fo-fi-fum look.

Those fierce eyes were the cause of no little alarm, I can assure you, when darkness swooped down upon Roberta and Polly and Dilsy, playing Lady-come-to-see in the old parlor in childlike unconsciousness of the passage of time.  Polly, the imp, would always insist upon singing “Lady Jane Grey,” as they tiptoed backward out of the room.  They did not dare to look away, for fear those terrible men would fly at them when they were not looking and throttle them with their long, bony fingers, so they joined hands and sung as they tiptoed backward: 

    Lady Jane Grey, she went to church for to pray;
      She went to the stile and there rested awhile;
    She went to the door and there rested a little more;
      She went up the aisle and there rested awhile;
        She looked up; she looked down;
        She saw a corpse lie on the ground;
      She said to the sexton, must I look so
      When I die?  Boo, boo!

Now when they came to the last part it was always Polly who stretched open her eyes till they looked like an owl’s great round eyes, and jumped at Roberta and Dilsy and hollered “Boo, boo!” Although they knew it was coming they were awfully scared, and would break loose and run, screaming like mad things, into the sitting-room, really believing the orientals were after them.  They had made believe it so many times, and Polly had said so many times, “I’ll cross my heart, Lil Missus, ’twuz dem drefful men dat sed ‘boo-oo’; I seed thar lips muven; you don’ ketch me in thar no mo’,” they had come to really believe it.  They had heard the story of the children who played wolf, and a wolf did sure enough come and devour them.  As many times as they had played Lady Jane Grey they were always worse scared the last time than ever before.  The sitting-room was a cozy place when they got there, panting for breath after their fright in the parlor.