e on
poetry; I knew it every time. As I studied I felt better, and when
Miss Amelia came to hear me she was good as gold. She asked if I liked
honey, and I started to tell her about the queen bee, but she had no
time to listen, so she said I should wait until after school. Then we
both forgot it, for when we reached home, the Princess' horse was
hitched to our rack, and I fairly ran in, I was so anxious to know what
was happening.

I was just perfectly amazed at grown people! After all the things our
folks had said! You'd have supposed that Laddie would have been locked
in the barn; father reading the thirty second Psalm to the Princess,
and mother on her knees asking God to open her eyes like Saul's when he
tried to kick against the pricks, and make her to see, as he did, that
God was not a myth, Well, there was no one in the sitting-room or the
parlour, but there were voices farther on; so I slipped in. I really
had to slip, for there was no other place they could be except the
parlour bedroom, and Sally's wedding things were locked up there, and
we were not to see until everything was finished, like I told you.

Well, this was what I saw: our bedroom had been a porch once, and when
we had been crowded on account of all of us coming, father enclosed it
and made a room. But he never had taken out the window in the wall.
So all I had to do when I wanted to know how fast the dresses were
being made, was to shove up the window above my bed, push back the
blind, and look in. I didn't care what she had. I just wanted to get
ahead of her and see before she was ready, to pay her for beating me.
I knew what she had, and I meant to tell her, and walk away with my
nose in the air when she offered to show me; but this was different. I
was wild to see what was going on because the Princess was there. The
room was small, and the big cherry four-poster was very large, and all
of them were talking, so no one paid the slightest attention to me.

Mother sat in the big rocking chair, with Sally on one of its arms,
leaning against her shoulder. Shelley and May and the sewing woman
were crowded between the wall and the footboard, and the others lined
against the wall. The bed was heaped in a tumble of everything a woman
ever wore. Seemed to me there was more stuff there than all the rest
of us had, put together. The working dresses and aprons had been made
on the machine, but there were heaps and stacks of hand-made
unde