he girls' room, where May lay,
which was also warmed by a big fireplace; father's room, and a room in
the attic for Nancy.

Lottie could not work in the cold, nor in May's room, so she
established herself in a warm corner of the living-room, far enough
from Nancy's dull eyes, and near a window. Day after day she worked,
making excuses to May for leaving her so much alone, and hiding her
work before her father came in at night.

I will tell you how she made the set of chessmen. First she hunted up
a smooth, thin board, from which she cut, with her father's saw, a
square piece about twenty inches square. The middle of this board she
laid out in blocks with a pencil and ruler, careful to make them
exactly perfect. The blocks were two inches square and there were
eight each way; in fact, it was a copy of the chessboard her father
had made.

These squares she covered with gilt and silver paper alternately,
covering the joinings with strips of very narrow gilt bordering. The
edge of the board she covered with a strip of drab-colored cloth she
found in the piece-trunk.

The board being finished,--and it was really very pretty,--she had
next to make the chessmen. For these she used the china dolls, the
tallest of which was three inches high. Half of the dolls were white
and the other half black; the white to wear blue and white, the black
ones scarlet and drab.

The dressing was a work of art, for she wished to make them look like
the characters they represented. She looked through the picture-books
in the house to see how kings and queens and knights and bishops were
dressed. Pictures of kings and queens she found in a geography,
knights in a volume of Shakespeare, and a bishop in an odd number of
an old magazine.

Then she went to work. The pawns were dressed as pages, the kings and
queens in flowing robes, with crowns of gilt or silver paper, glued
on, the knights in coats of mail,--strips of silver paper laid over
one another like the shingles on a roof,--the bishops in long gowns,
with mitre on the head,--all in the two colors of their respective
sides. The four castles were made of pieces of gray sandpaper, glued
into cylinder shape, with battlement-shaped strips around the top;
when glued on their standards, they looked like little stone castles.

When they were all dressed,--and it took many days and much
contriving,--Lottie found that few of them would stand up, and those
which possessed the accomplishment we