red into barns, the young Simpsons groped about for some
inexpensive form of excitement, and settled upon the selling of soap
for a premium. They had sold enough to their immediate neighbors during
the earlier autumn to secure a child's handcart, which, though very
weak on its pins, could be trundled over the country roads. With large
business sagacity and an executive capacity which must have been
inherited from their father, they now proposed to extend their
operations to a larger area and distribute soap to contiguous villages,
if these villages could be induced to buy. The Excelsior Soap Company
paid a very small return of any kind to its infantile agents, who were
scattered through the state, but it inflamed their imaginations by the
issue of circulars with highly colored pictures of the premiums to be
awarded for the sale of a certain number of cakes. It was at this
juncture that Clara Belle and Susan Simpson consulted Rebecca, who
threw herself solidly and wholeheartedly into the enterprise, promising
her help and that of Emma Jane Perkins. The premiums within their
possible grasp were three: a bookcase, a plush reclining chair, and a
banquet lamp. Of course the Simpsons had no books, and casting aside,
without thought or pang, the plush chair, which might have been of some
use in a family of seven persons (not counting Mr. Simpson, who
ordinarily sat elsewhere at the town's expense), they warmed themselves
rapturously in the vision of the banquet lamp, which speedily became to
them more desirable than food, drink, or clothing. Neither Emma Jane
nor Rebecca perceived anything incongruous in the idea of the Simpsons
striving for a banquet lamp. They looked at the picture daily and knew
that if they themselves were free agents they would toil, suffer, ay
sweat, for the happy privilege of occupying the same room with that
lamp through the coming winter evenings. It looked to be about eight
feet tall in the catalogue, and Emma Jane advised Clara Belle to
measure the height of the Simpson ceilings; but a note in the margin of
the circular informed them that it stood two and a half feet high when
set up in all its dignity and splendor on a proper table, three dollars
extra. It was only of polished brass, continued the circular, though it
was invariably mistaken for solid gold, and the shade that accompanied
it (at least it accompanied it if the agent sold a hundred extra cakes)
was of crinkled crepe paper printed in a do