was, and in many places it rubbed and hurt my pride; in many places at many
times it sapped my courage; in many ways it pruned and probed into my
innermost being with a searching knife to see if I really did have any
intelligence or soul, and at all times it left me with a feeling of just
having been sprouted off the cosmic. I know what I mean, but it doesn't
sound as if I did. This is the way most of it happened to me in my first
six weeks of life in the rustic.

How did I know that when you cleaned up a house that hadn't been cleaned
up for about fifteen years you must wait for ten days after you came to
that realization for a sunshiny day, and carry all the beds out in the yard
before you began, and that no matter how much awful dust and cobwebs you
swept and mopped out or how much old furniture you polished until it
reflected your face, it was all perfectly futile unless the bed-sunning
ceremony had been first observed? Just how were the ability to speak French
in the most exclusive circles of Parisian society and a cultivated
knowledge of every picture-gallery in the world going to keep me from
making a blunder that would put me down in Mrs. Pennie Addcock's mind as a
barbarian?

"Why, Mrs. Tillett and me have been getting ready all along to come and
help you beat and sun the beds the first sunshiny day and then turn to with
our buckets and mops and brooms. Now you've gone and done the wrong thing
by all this polishing before a single bed had been beat and aired." As she
spoke Mrs. Addcock surveyed my house, upon which I had spent every waking
moment of my muscular strength, assisted by Polly Corn-tassel and sometimes
Bud of the blue eyes, but not at all by Rufus, who resented the cleansing
process to such an extent that he wrapped up his jaw in a piece of old
flannel and retired to the hay-loft when Bud and Polly and I insisted on
invading the horrors of his kitchen.