ow, with its cushion and flounce of Turkey red; and
Kate had speedily stitched up a cover for hers to match, of cloth
that Mrs. Scherman gave her) stood one each side the chimney,--in
the recesses. A red and white patchwork quilt, done in stars, Bel's
own work before she ever came to Boston, lay folded across the foot
of the bed, in patriotic contrast with the blue,--reversing the
colors in stars and stripes. Bel had found in the attic a discarded
stairway drugget, scarlet and black, of which, the centre was worn
to threads, but the bright border still remained; and this she had
asked for and sewed around the square of neutral tinted carpet, upon
whose middle the round table stood, covering its dullness with red
again, the color of the cloth. There was plenty of bordering left,
of which she pieced a foot-mat for the floor before the
dressing-glass, and in the open grate now lay a little unlighted
pile of kindlings and coals, as carefully placed behind well
blackened bars and a facing of paper, as that in the parlor below.

"It looks nice," Bel said to Mrs. Scherman, "and we don't expect to
light it, unless one of us is sick, or something."

"Light it whenever you wish for it," Mrs. Scherman had replied. "I
am perfectly willing to trust your reasonableness for that."

So on Sunday afternoons, or of a bitter cold morning, they had their
own little blaze to sit or dress by; and it made the difference of a
continual feeling of cheeriness and comfort to them, always possible
when not immediately actual; and of a bushel or two of coal,
perhaps, in the winter's supply of fuel.

"Where were the babies of a Sunday afternoon,--and how about the
offered tending?"

This was one more place for them also; a treat and a change to
Sinsie and Marmaduke, or a perfectly safe and sweet and comfortable
resource in tending Baby Karen, who would lie content on the soft
quilts by the half hour, feeling in the blind, ignorant way that
little babies certainly do, the novelty and rest.

The household, you see, was melting into one; the spirit of home
was above and below. It was home as much as wages, that these girls
had come for; and they expected to help make it. Not that they
parted with their own individual lives and interests, either; every
one must have things that are separate; it is the way human souls
and lives are made. It would have been so with daughters, or
sisters. But in a true living, it is the individual interests that
at