the scrub-woman of the village, trying to squeeze a wide
table through a narrow door, while Noah, their half-witted chore-boy, was
beating carpets on the lawn, he knew it was spring house-cleaning.

This the doctor vowed was worse than a fire and as bad as a moving, for
Martha never would do one room at a time, but must upset the whole house
at once and dump everything outdoors. And from the time the furniture was
moved out until it went back, all one could smell or see in the house was
soapsuds and bare, wet floors. If one wished to sit down, they had to
retire to the yard, and repose on a pile of carpets. If they wished to
eat, they had to do so off the kitchen table on the side porch. If they
wanted to dress, their clothes were in the yard, under chairs, pictures
and bedding, and the task was so trying that finally one did not want to
change so much as a collar.

The doctor always groaned when he got the first glimpse of housecleaning,
and gave a sigh of relief when it was over. This was one time when he made
longer calls on his patients and idled his time away at the drug store.

As for Martha, she went around with a frown on her face, and with a
nervous, jerky manner, all the while talking of the terrible amount of
hard work there was to do, and grumbling that she had never seen such a
dirty house in all her life. But down in her heart she enjoyed it, for she
liked nothing better than to scrub and clean. As for the dirty house, a
fly would have slipped and broken its neck, the rooms were so clean from
cellar to garret, there being only the doctor to keep house for, and no
children to clutter up things. But just the same, on the first of May and
first of September the house had to be upset from top to bottom and
cleaned thoroughly, for Martha was born in New England and lived up to the
rules of house-keeping she had learned in her girlhood.

As for Zip, he loved it for it gave him such a chance to nose into
everything. And you can rest assured he did it. There was not a bandbox of
any kind that he did not push the lid off with his nose and look into it,
or a bag of any kind that he did not smell and smell until he discovered
what was in it. He got under everyone's feet and nearly tripped them when
their arms were full of things and they could not see where they were
stepping. He was kicked by Noah, hit with the mop by Martha and had the
scrubbing brush thrown at him by the scrub-woman. But these things did not
di