ow that when you cleaned up a house that hadn't been cleaned
up for about fifteen years you must wait for ten days after you came to
that realization for a sunshiny day, and carry all the beds out in the yard
before you began, and that no matter how much awful dust and cobwebs you
swept and mopped out or how much old furniture you polished until it
reflected your face, it was all perfectly futile unless the bed-sunning
ceremony had been first observed? Just how were the ability to speak French
in the most exclusive circles of Parisian society and a cultivated
knowledge of every picture-gallery in the world going to keep me from
making a blunder that would put me down in Mrs. Pennie Addcock's mind as a
barbarian?

"Why, Mrs. Tillett and me have been getting ready all along to come and
help you beat and sun the beds the first sunshiny day and then turn to with
our buckets and mops and brooms. Now you've gone and done the wrong thing
by all this polishing before a single bed had been beat and aired." As she
spoke Mrs. Addcock surveyed my house, upon which I had spent every waking
moment of my muscular strength, assisted by Polly Corn-tassel and sometimes
Bud of the blue eyes, but not at all by Rufus, who resented the cleansing
process to such an extent that he wrapped up his jaw in a piece of old
flannel and retired to the hay-loft when Bud and Polly and I insisted on
invading the horrors of his kitchen.

"Oh, my dear Mrs. Addcock, won't you and Mrs. Tillett please forgive me for
being so ignorant and help me do it to-day?" I pleaded as I picked up a
small Tillett, who was peeping soft wooing at me from where he balanced
himself on uncertain and chubby legs against his mother's skirts.

"Well, in this case there is just nothing else to do, but turn to on the
beds now, wrong end first, but next year you'll know," she answered me with
indulgent compromise in her voice. "And I guess we'll find some broom and
mop work yet to be done. Come on, Mrs. Tillett. I guess Nancy can mind the
baby all right while we work."

"Oh, he ain't no trouble now except he wants to find out all about the
world by tasting of it. Don't let him eat a worm or sech, and he'll be all
right," answered the beaming young mother of the toddler. "And, Miss Nancy,
I was jest going to tell you that I have got a nice pattern of a plain kind
of work dress if you would like to use it," she added as she pointedly did
not look at my peasant's smock that hung in s