And the
plum-colored plush frame didn't sit very well on the vermilion wall
paper. But Mrs. Cinnamon hung it over the sofa in the expectation of
changing the paper some day. It stayed there until the fateful
evening when Mr. Nelson Chur called on Miss Editha Cinnamon and was
just warming up a proposal that had held over almost as long as the
wall paper, when bang! down came the overhanging brass drawing and
bent itself hopelessly on Mr. Chur's skull. Mr. Chur said something
that may have been Damocles. But he did not propose, and Mrs.
Budlong was weeks wondering why Mrs. Cinnamon was so snippy to her.

The hammered brass era gave way to the opposite extreme of painted
velvet. They say it is a difficult art; and it may well be. Mrs.
Budlong's first landscape might as well have been painted on the side
of her Scotch collie.

Her most finished roses had something of the look of shaggy
tarantulas that had fallen into a paint pot and emerged in a towering
rage. It was in that velvetolene stratum that she painted for the
church a tasseled pulpit cloth that hung down a yard below the Bible.
Dr. Torpadie was a very soothing preacher, but no one slept o'sermons
during the reign of that pulpit cloth.

Mrs. Budlong was so elated over the success of it, however, that she
announced her intention of going in for stained glass. She planned a
series of the sweetest windows to replace those already in the
church. But she never got nearer to that than painted china.

The painted china era was a dire era. The cups would break and the
colors would run, and they never came out what she expected after
they were fired. Of course she knew that the pigments must suffer
alteration in the furnace, but there was always a surprise beyond
surprise.

She soon became accustomed to getting green roses with crimson
leaves, and deep blue apple blossoms against a pure white sky, but
when she finished one complete set of table china in fifty pieces,
each cup and saucer with a flower on it, the result looked so
startlingly like something from a medical museum, that she never
dared give the set away. She lent it to the cook to eat her meals
on. The set went fast.

During this epoch Master Ulysses Budlong Jr. was studying at school a
physiology ornamented with a few pictures in color representing the
stomachs of alcohol specialists. They were intended, perhaps, to
frighten little school children from frequenting saloons during
recess,