Now they were completing new dressing sacks, and had enjoyed this job very much, as each chose her own material, and suited her own taste in the making.  Jill’s was white, with tiny scarlet leaves all over it, trimmed with red braid and buttons so like checkerberries she was tempted to eat them.  Molly’s was gay, with bouquets of every sort of flower, scalloped all round, and adorned with six buttons, each of a different color, which she thought the last touch of elegance.  Merry’s, though the simplest, was the daintiest of the three, being pale blue, trimmed with delicate edging, and beautifully made.

Mrs. Minot had been reading from Miss Strickland’s “Queens of England” while the girls worked, and an illustrated Shakspeare lay open on the table, as well as several fine photographs of historical places for them to look at as they went along.  The hour was over now, the teacher gone, and the pupils setting the last stitches as they talked over the lesson, which had interested them exceedingly.

“I really believe I have got Henry’s six wives into my head right at last.  Two Annes, three Katherines, and one Jane.  Now I’ve seen where they lived and heard their stories, I quite feel as if I knew them,” said Merry, shaking the threads off her work before she folded it up to carry home.

  “’King Henry the Eighth to six spouses was wedded,
  One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded,’

was all I knew about them before.  Poor things, what a bad time they did have,” added Jill, patting down the red braid, which would pucker a bit at the corners.

“Katherine Parr had the best of it, because she outlived the old tyrant and so kept her head on,” said Molly, winding the thread round her last button, as if bound to fasten it on so firmly that nothing should decapitate that.

“I used to think I’d like to be a queen or a great lady, and wear velvet and jewels, and live in a palace, but now I don’t care much for that sort of splendor.  I like to make things pretty at home, and know that they all depend on me, and love me very much.  Queens are not happy, and I am,” said Merry, pausing to look at Anne Hathaway’s cottage as she put up the picture, and to wonder if it was very pleasant to have a famous man for one’s husband.

“I guess your missionarying has done you good; mine has, and I’m getting to have things my own way more and more every day.  Miss Bat is so amiable, I hardly know her, and father tells her to ask Miss Molly when she goes to him for orders.  Isn’t that fun?” laughed Molly, in high glee, at the agreeable change.  “I like it ever so much, but I don’t want to stay so all my days.  I mean to travel, and just as soon as I can I shall take Boo and go all round the world, and see everything,” she added, waving her gay sack, as if it were the flag she was about to nail to the masthead of her ship.