creations
in the drawing-room, or rather parlour. A drawing-room there was on the
first floor, with a charming look-out, not on the dreary fir-trees, but
on the romantic undulating forest-land; but the drawing-room had not
been used since the death of the last Mrs. Leslie. It was deemed
too good to sit in, except when there was company: there never being
company, it was never sat in. Indeed, now the paper was falling off
the walls with the damp, and the rats, mice, and moths--those "edaces
rerum"--had eaten, between them, most of the chair-bottoms and a
considerable part of the floor. Therefore, the parlour was the sole
general sitting-room; and being breakfasted in, dined, and supped in,
and, after supper, smoked in by Mr. Leslie to the accompaniment of
rum-and-water, it is impossible to deny that it had what is called "a
smell,"--a comfortable, wholesome family smell, speaking of numbers,
meals, and miscellaneous social habitation. There were two windows: one
looked full on the fir-trees; the other on the farmyard, with the pigsty
closing the view. Near the fir-tree window sat Mrs. Leslie; before her,
on a high stool, was a basket of the children's clothes that wanted
mending. A work-table of rosewood inlaid with brass, which had been a
wedding-present, and was a costly thing originally, but in that peculiar
taste which is vulgarly called "Brummagem," stood at hand: the brass
had started in several places, and occasionally made great havoc in
the children's fingers and in Mrs. Leslie's gown; in fact it was the
liveliest piece of furniture in the house, thanks to the petulant
brasswork, and could not have been more mischievous if it had been a
monkey. Upon the work-table lay a housewife and thimble, and scissors,
and skeins of worsted and thread, and little scraps of linen and
cloth for patches. But Mrs. Leslie was not actually working,--she was
preparing to work; she had been preparing to work for the last hour and
a half. Upon her lap she supported a novel, by a lady who wrote much for
a former generation, under the name of "Mrs. Bridget Blue Mantle." She
had a small needle in her left hand, and a very thick piece of thread
in her right; occasionally she applied the end of the said thread to her
lips, and then--her eyes fixed on the novel--made a blind, vacillating
attack at the eye of the needle. But a camel would have gone through it
with quite as much ease. Nor did the novel alone engage Mrs. Leslie's
attention, fo