The old hall seemed to have donned strange carnival clothes, for a
mystic Saturnalia. It was literally swaddled in bedquilts,--
tumbler-quilts, rising-suns, Jacob's-ladders, log-cabins,
and the more modern and altogether terrible crazy-quilt. There were
square yards of tidies, on wall and table, and furlongs of home-knit
lace. Dilly looked at this product of the patient art of woman with a
dispirited gaze.

"Seems a kind of a waste of time, don't it?" she said, dreamily, "when
things are blowin' outside? I wisht I could see suthin' made once to
look as handsome as green buds an' branches. Law, dear, now jest turn
your eyes away from them walls, an' see the tables full of apples! an'
them piles o' carrots, an' cabbages an' squashes over there! Well,
'tain't so bad if you can look at things the sun's ever shone on, no
matter if they be under cover." She wandered up and down the tables,
caressing the rounded outlines of the fruit with her loving gaze. The
apples, rich and fragrant, were a glory and a joy. There were great
pound sweetings, full of the pride of mere bigness; long purple
gilly-flowers, craftily hiding their mealy joys under a sad-colored
skin; and the Hubbardston, a portly creature quite unspoiled by the
prosperity of growth, and holding its lovely scent and flavor like an
individual charm. There was the Bald'in, stand-by old and good as
bread; and there were all the rest. We know them, we who have courted
Pomona in her fair New England orchards.

Near the fancy-work table sat Mrs. Blair, of the Old Ladies' Home, on a
stool she had wrenched from an unwilling boy, who declared it belonged
up in the Academy, whence he had brought it "to stan' on" while he
drove a nail. And though he besought her to rise and let him return it,