"

I gasped with surprise at this sudden and sweeping reduction of terms,
but Lorna said calmly--

"Done! A halfpenny discount if paid within the hour!" and they shook
hands with mutual satisfaction.

"Cheap at the price!" was Lorna's comment, as the contractor left the
room, and before the next few days were over I heartily agreed with this
opinion. Midas was an ideal workman, grudging neither time nor pains to
accomplish his task in a satisfactory manner. His long arms and strong
wrists made light of what would have been heavy tasks for us, and the
dirtier he grew the more he enjoyed it. It must be dreadful to live in
a town! Lorna assured me plaintively that the room had been thoroughly
spring-cleaned at Easter, but I should have thought it had happened
nearer the Flood. I swallowed pecks of dust, and my hands grew raw with
washing before we began to paint. I thought we should never have
finished enamelling that room. The first coat made hardly any
impression on the background, and we had to go over it again and again
before we got anything like a good effect. To a casual observer it
looked really very nice, but we knew where to look for shortcomings, and
I grew hot whenever anyone looked at a certain panel in the door.

Then we set to work on the paper. First you cut it into lengths. It
seems quite easy, but it isn't, because you waste yards making the
patterns meet, and then you haven't enough, and you go into town to buy
more, and they haven't it in stock, and it has to be ordered, and you
sit and champ, and can't get any further.

Then you make the paste. It smells horrid, and do what you will, cover
yourself as best you can, it gets up to the eyes! We wore two old
holland skirts of Lorna's, quite short and trig, and washing shirts, and
huge print wrappers; but before we had been working for an hour our
fingers were glued together; then we yawned or sneezed and put our hands
to our faces, and _they_ were stickied. Then bits of hair--"tendrils"
as they call them in books--fell down, and we fastened them up, and our
hair got as bad. We were spectacles!

A kettle was kept on the hob, and we were continually bathing our hands
in hot water, for, of course, we dared not touch the outside of the
paper unless they were quite clean, and the table wanted washing before
each fresh strip was laid down, as the paste had always oozed off the
edges of the last piece. There is one thing sure and certain: I