THE CALICO PAPER. 189

of the gray-and-cranberry stripe, and rode triumphantly home.
Even our cold rice did not darken our horizon that happy
morning.

But, after all, the paper did n’t go up that day; nor the
next; in fact, it was not till just before mother came home
that it was fairly on. I don’t remember all the reasons ; but
I know that father was taken sick that night, and was too
sick to be turned out of the room for several days; and then
Uncle Belshazzar appeared with a cousin or two, to make a
visit ; and the agent for Western seminaries stayed at our
house, and Emma Elizabeth was called to the dying-beds of
some half-dozen nieces, and things ran together as things al-
ways do run together with Alta and me.

But at last the paper went up. Alta and I were happy.

Té took us three days and a quarter to get it up, but we
were happy. It gave us the headache and the back-ache ;

and Alta took pleurisy from the open window, and I tipped
“over the steps and lamed my ankle, and the paste spilled
down the register, and a friend of Alta’s (he’s in a lawyer’s
office down town) came to see us in the midst of it, and
Emma Elizabeth asked him right up, where we stood in our
old, unbelted wrappers, dripping with paste, and scarlet with
hurry, — Alta on the steps, and I on the cutting-table; but
still Alta and I were happy.

Nobody knows, who has not been a paperer, what a neat,
brisk, clean, pleasant business it is. I often tell Alta we will
set up for ourselves in it some time, when mother is dead,