One thing that helped to reconcile us to spending a good share of our summer days in Walnut-tree Academy was that the school-mistress made us very comfortable.  Boys at our age are not very sensitive about matters of taste and colour and so forth, but even we discovered that Mrs. Wood had that knack of adapting rooms to their inhabitants, and making them pleasant to the eye, which seems to be a trick at the end of some people’s fingers, and quite unlearnable by others.  When she had made the old miser’s rooms to her mind, we might have understood, if we had speculated about it, how it was that she had not profited by my mother’s sound advice to send all his “rubbishy odds and ends” (the irregularity and ricketiness and dustiness of which made my mother shudder) to be “sold at the nearest auction-rooms, and buy some good solid furniture of the cabinet-maker who furnished for everybody in the neighbourhood, which would be the cheapest in the long-run, besides making the rooms look like other people’s at last.”  That she evaded similar recommendations of paperhangers and upholsterers, and of wall-papers and carpets, and curtains with patterns that would “stand,” and wear best, and show dirt least, was a trifle in the eyes of all good housekeepers, when our farming-man’s daughter brought the amazing news with her to Sunday tea, that “the missus” had had in old Sally, and had torn the paper off the parlour, and had made Sally “lime-wash the walls, for all the world as if it was a cellar.”  Moreover, she had “gone over” the lower part herself, and was now painting on the top of that.  There was nothing for it, after this news, but to sigh and conclude that there was something about the old place which made everybody a little queer who came to live in it.

But when Jem and I saw the parlour (which was now the school-room), we decided that it “looked very nice,” and was “uncommonly comfortable.”  The change was certainly amazing, and made the funeral day seem longer ago than it really was.  The walls were not literally lime-washed; but (which is the same thing, except for a little glue!) they were distempered, a soft pale pea-green.  About a yard deep above the wainscot this was covered with a dark sombre green tint, and along the upper edge of this, as a border all round the room, the school-mistress had painted a trailing wreath of white periwinkle.  The border was painted with the same materials as the walls, and with very rapid touches.  The white flowers were skilfully relieved by the dark ground, and the varied tints of the leaves, from the deep evergreen of the old ones to the pale yellow of the young shoots, had demanded no new colours, and were wonderfully life-like and pretty.  There was another border, right round the top of the room; but that was painted on paper and fastened on.  It was a Bible text—­“Keep Innocency, and take heed to the thing that is right, for that shall bring a man Peace at the last.”  And Mrs. Wood had done the text also.