tables, stood baskets and dishes of fruit-apples and plums and peaches
and grapes-set in proper foliage of most natural appearance, like enough
to deceive a bird or the Sunday-school scholars, when on rare occasions
they were admitted into this holy of holies. Out of boxes, apparently
filled with earth in the corners of the rooms, grew what seemed to be
vines trained to run all about the cornices and to festoon the pictures,
but which were really strings, colored in imitation of the real vine, and
spreading out into paper foliage. To complete the naturalistic character
of these everlasting vines, which no scale-bugs could assail, there were
bunches of wonderful grapes depending here and there to excite the
cupidity of both bird and child. There was no cruelty in the nature of
Patience, and she made prisoners of neither birds nor squirrels, but
cunning cages here and there held most lifelike counterfeits of their
willing captives. There was nothing in the room that was alive, except
the dainty owner, but it seemed to be a museum of natural history. The
rugs on the floor were of her own devising and sewing together, and
rivaled in color and ingenuity those of Bokhara.

But Patience was a student of the heavens as well as of the earth, and it
was upon the ceiling that her imagination expanded. There one could see
in their order the constellations of the heavens, represented by
paper-gilt stars, of all magnitudes, most wonderful to behold. This part
of her decorations was the most difficult of all. The constellations were
not made from any geography of the heavens, but from actual nightly
observation of the positions of the heavenly bodies. Patience confessed
that the getting exactly right of the Great Dipper had caused her most
trouble. On the night that was constructed she sat up till three o'clock
in the morning, going out and studying it and coming in and putting up
one star at a time. How could she reach the high ceiling? Oh, she took a
bean-pole, stuck the gilt star on the end of it, having paste on the