ll it next,
and so I wanted to be handy with it and rattle it off like I was used to
it.

It was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice house, too. I hadn't seen
no house out in the country before that was so nice and had so much
style. It didn't have an iron latch on the front door, nor a wooden one
with a buckskin string, but a brass knob to turn, the same as houses in
town. There warn't no bed in the parlor, nor a sign of a bed; but heaps
of parlors in towns has beds in them. There was a big fireplace that was
bricked on the bottom, and the bricks was kept clean and red by pouring
water on them and scrubbing them with another brick; sometimes they wash
them over with red water-paint that they call Spanish-brown, same as they
do in town. They had big brass dog-irons that could hold up a saw-log.
There was a clock on the middle of the mantelpiece, with a picture of a
town painted on the bottom half of the glass front, and a round place in
the middle of it for the sun, and you could see the pendulum swinging
behind it. It was beautiful to hear that clock tick; and sometimes when
one of these peddlers had been along and scoured her up and got her in
good shape, she would start in and strike a hundred and fifty before she
got tuckered out. They wouldn't took any money for her.

Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made
out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy. By one of the parrots
was a cat made of crockery, and a crockery dog by the other; and when you
pressed down on them they squeaked, but didn't open their mouths nor look
different nor interested. They squeaked through underneath. There was a
couple of big wild-turkey-wing fans spread out behind those things. On
the table in the middle of the room was a kind of a lovely crockery
basket that had apples and oranges and peaches and grapes piled up in it,
which was much redder and yellower and prettier than real ones is, but
they warn't real because you could see where pieces had got chipped off
and showed the white chalk, or whatever it was, underneath.

This table had a cover made out of beautiful oilcloth, with a red and
blue spread-eagle painted on it, and a painted border all around. It
come all the way from Philadelphia, they said. There was some books,
too, piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table. One was a
big family Bible full of pictures. One was Pilgrim's Progress, about a
man that left his