e bits of wire clinging
to it, answered the purpose very well. The door completed the
skeleton.

We used a beautiful soft blue burlap. Tacking on proved a more
difficult matter than we had anticipated, owing to the fact that our
carpenter had used cypress for the framework. We stretched the
material taut and then tacked it fast with sharp-pointed,
large-headed brass tacks, and while inserting these we measured
carefully the distances between the tacks in order to keep this
trimming uniform. The two walls supplied by the framework were
quickly covered, but the rough wall of the attic necessitated some
cutting, as we had to tack the burlap to the uprights and these had
not been placed with yard-wide material in view. Above the
screen-door frame was a hiatus of space running up into the peak.
The carpenter had thoughtfully run two strips up to the roof and
this enabled us to fill in by cutting and turning in the cloth. A
corresponding space above the window received similar treatment.
Then we covered the inner surface of the screen door and we had a
room.

But we were far from satisfied. The room looked bare and crude. We
bought a can of dark-oak stain and gave the floor a coat and this
improved matters so much that we stained the wood visible on the
door frame and about the window. Having finished this, we saw the
need of doing something for the ceiling. The ceiling was merely the
inner surface of the roof. The builders had made it of boards of
varying sizes, the rafters were rough and splintery and there were
myriads of nails sticking through everywhere. It looked a hopeless
task. But we bought more stain and went to work. Before beginning we
covered our precious blue walls with newspapers, donned our oldest
clothes and spread papers well over the floor. It was well that we
did. The staining was not difficult work but the nails made it
splashy and we were pretty well spotted when we finished.

But when we did finish we felt compensated. The nails had become
invisible. The dull blue walls with their bright brass trimming, the
soft brown floor and the stained, raftered roof made the room the
most attractive in the house. We could not rest, although the hour
was late and we were both tired, until we had furnis