As soon as I
get poor enough to afford it I'm going to have a lot of phlox and London
pride and bachelor's buttons out there in the back yard, and the girls
can run their clotheslines somewhere else."
"It's hard to keep flowers in a city," said Jane.
"I know it is. At our old house we had such a nice little rosebush in
the front yard. I hated so to leave it behind--one of those little
yellow brier-roses. No, it wasn't yellow; it was just--'yaller.' And it
always scratched my nose when I tried to smell it. But oh, child"--
wistfully--"if I could only smell it now!"
"Couldn't you have transplanted it?" asked Jane, sympathetically.
"I went back the very next day after we moved out, with a peach-basket
and a fire-shovel. But my poor bush was buried under seven feet of yellow
sand. To-day there's seven stories of brick and mortar. So all I've got
from the old place is just this furniture of ma's and the wall-paper."
"The wall-paper?"
"Not the identical same, of course. It's like what I had in my bedroom
when I was a girl. I remembered the pattern, and tried everywhere to
match it. At first I just tried on Twenty-second Street. Then I went
down-town. Then I tried all the little places away out on the West Side.
Then I had the pattern put down on paper, and I made a tour of the
country. I went to Belvidere, and to Beloit, and to Janesville, and to
lots of other places between here and Geneva. And finally--"
"Well, what--finally?"
"Finally, I sent down East and had eight or ten rolls made to order.
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