They all drank it merrily, and began the experiment by lounging for the rest of the day.  Next morning, Meg did not appear till ten o’clock.  Her solitary breakfast did not taste good, and the room seemed lonely and untidy, for Jo had not filled the vases, Beth had not dusted, and Amy’s books lay scattered about.  Nothing was neat and pleasant but ’Marmee’s corner’, which looked as usual.  And there Meg sat, to ’rest and read’, which meant to yawn and imagine what pretty summer dresses she would get with her salary.  Jo spent the morning on the river with Laurie and the afternoon reading and crying over The Wide, Wide World, up in the apple tree.  Beth began by rummaging everything out of the big closet where her family resided, but getting tired before half done, she left her establishment topsy-turvy and went to her music, rejoicing that she had no dishes to wash.  Amy arranged her bower, put on her best white frock, smoothed her curls, and sat down to draw under the honeysuckle, hoping someone would see and inquire who the young artist was.  As no one appeared but an inquisitive daddy-longlegs, who examined her work with interest, she went to walk, got caught in a shower, and came home dripping.

At teatime they compared notes, and all agreed that it had been a delightful, though unusually long day.  Meg, who went shopping in the afternoon and got a ‘sweet blue muslin’, had discovered, after she had cut the breadths off, that it wouldn’t wash, which mishap made her slightly cross.  Jo had burned the skin off her nose boating, and got a raging headache by reading too long.  Beth was worried by the confusion of her closet and the difficulty of learning three or four songs at once, and Amy deeply regretted the damage done her frock, for Katy Brown’s party was to be the next day and now like Flora McFlimsey, she had ‘nothing to wear’.  But these were mere trifles, and they assured their mother that the experiment was working finely.  She smiled, said nothing, and with Hannah’s help did their neglected work, keeping home pleasant and the domestic machinery running smoothly.  It was astonishing what a peculiar and uncomfortable state of things was produced by the ‘resting and reveling’ process.  The days kept getting longer and longer, the weather was unusually variable and so were tempers; an unsettled feeling possessed everyone, and Satan found plenty of mischief for the idle hands to do.  As the height of luxury, Meg put out some of her sewing, and then found time hang so heavily, that she fell to snipping and spoiling her clothes in her attempts to furbish them up a la Moffat.  Jo read till her eyes gave out and she was sick of books, got so fidgety that even good-natured Laurie had a quarrel with her, and so reduced in spirits that she desperately wished she had gone with Aunt March.  Beth got on pretty well, for she was constantly forgetting that it was to be all play and no work, and fell back into her old ways now and then.  But something