BREAKING DOWN.
The first care of Matty and Nelly in the morning, after they had taken
their breakfast, was to water their needlework plants.
"I can't think," said Matty to her sister, "how you could be so silly as
to choose that ugly Plain-work,--I'm sure there's not a bit of beauty in
it."
"I wait for the fruit," said Nelly meekly.
"It does not climb high like mine, to adorn the walls; it creeps heavily
along the ground. It is such a mean-looking plant."
"We shall not think it mean in the season of ripening," observed Nelly.
"Ah, here comes Lubin!" cried Matty; "he was late for breakfast, as
usual. Good-morning, my lazy brother. Do you know what has become of
Dick?"
"Not I," answered Lubin, with a yawn.
"Perhaps he has been working at his cottage already," said Nelly, "and
has been studying the ladder of Spelling. Just wait till I fetch the can
of paste--we'll put Attention into several little pots, and all begin
papering our walls together."
Nelly soon brought the paste, which she had kept during the night at
house Needful. As Lubin and his sisters went towards the group of
cottages, they heard the cheerful voice of Dick calling to them from the
inside of his own.
"Come in here with you, and I'll show you something worth the seeing."
"Why, Dick," exclaimed Matty, who was the first to enter, "you don't
mean to say that you have papered half your parlour already!"
"I don't say it, but you may see it," said Dick.
"What wonderful progress you have made!"
"I should say that I have," returned Dick, with a mighty self-satisfied
air, as he looked around his parlour, already quite gay with the
Robinson Crusoe pattern. "I've done more, too, than you can see," he
added, striking his hand on the ladder of Spelling, which he had placed
by the wall; "I've learned every sentence in this ladder as perfectly as
any man can learn them, and can now climb to the very top with the
greatest safety and ease."
Matty and Lubin looked on their clever brother with eyes in which
admiration seemed mixed with a little envy.
"But how could you paper the room without paste?" exclaimed Nelly; "I
had charge of the whole supply."
"My dear simple sister," replied Dick, "you don't suppose that all the
paste in the world is held in your can, or that no other kind is to be
had. I took a stroll yesterday evening with my acquaintance, young
Pride, and he told me of a first-rate paste called Emulation, showed me
where to get it, and helped me to lay in a capital store. You've no
notion how pleasantly it made me get on with my work. I believe I shall
paper all my four rooms before you have finished a single one of yours."
"Oh, let me have some of your paste!" cried Matty.
"Have it and welcome," said Dick; "it's cheap, and there's plenty for
all. I don't know what is making our little Nelly look so serious and
grave."
"Oh, Dick," said the child, in a hesitating tone, "did not dear mother
warn us to have nothing to do with Pride?"
"He's a jolly good fellow!" cried Dick.
"But mother forbade us to keep company with him."
"Really, Nelly," said Dick, rather sharply, "I'm old enough to choose my
own friends."
"But if Pride should prove to be not a friend but an enemy? Oh, dear
brother, I should be afraid to use anything that Pride recommends."
Dick burst into a laugh. "Use what you like, poor, patient, plodding
little pussy; leave me to follow my own ways. You've not resolved, as I
have, to win the crown of Success. You were never made to shine, unless
it be like some little taper, giving its quiet light in a cottage; while
I mean to dazzle the world some day, like the eruption of a splendid
volcano."
"A precious lot of mischief you may do," observed Lubin; "better be a
sober taper in a cottage, that cheers and gives light to some one, than
a blazing volcano, that makes a grand show indeed, but leaves ruins and
ashes behind it."
"Every one to his liking!" cried Dick, nimbly mounting the ladder, and
spelling over the sentences so fast that his hearers could hardly follow
him. Doubtless he meant to show off his talent, but, in his eagerness to
be admired, he forgot--who can wonder that he did so?--the right
spelling of one little word. Down he fell crack on the floor, the moment
that he put his foot on the _poney_!
Up jumped Dick in a second, not hurt indeed, but a good deal mortified,
especially as Lubin laughed, and Matty began to titter.
"Here we go up, up, up,
Here we go down, down, down, oh!
That is clever Dick's way
Of winning the silver crown, oh!"
cried Lubin, his fat sides shaking with mirth.
"I would not stand that from him!" exclaimed a voice from without, and
the shadow of Pride, a beetle-browed, black-haired, ill-favoured lad,
now darkened the doorway of Dick.
"I'll stand no impudence!" cried Dick in a passion, and, dashing with
clenched fist up to Lubin, he knocked him down with a blow.
"Give it him well!" shouted Pride.
But Nelly rushed forward in haste, and threw herself between her two
brothers. "Oh, don't, don't!" she cried in distress; "remember our
mother, remember the love which we all should bear to one another! It
was wrong in Lubin to laugh--but oh, please--please don't beat him any
more."
"I'll beat him in another way!" exclaimed Dick, who was, perhaps, a
little ashamed of having struck his younger brother; "I'll beat him at
climbing this ladder,--one fall shall never daunt me!" and once more he
ascended the steps, spelling without a single blunder, till, on the very
topmost round, he waved his hand in triumph.
"I hope you're not hurt?" whispered Nelly to Lubin, who was slowly
rising from the ground.
The boy turned gloomily away.
"You don't want her, do you, to cuddle and pet you as if you were a
great big baby?" said Pride. "I wonder you don't go to your own cottage,
and shut yourself up quietly there."
"I'll go and have nothing more to do with any of them," muttered Lubin,
pushing Nelly aside, and leaving the cottage of Dick in a mood by no
means amiable.
Nelly sighed; and as it appeared that she could at present be of no more
use to her brothers, she quietly took her portion of Attention, and went
to paper her own little room.
I shall not tell of all her difficulties and troubles, nor how, when
using the ladder of Spelling, she found it several times give way, and
drop her down on the floor. The process of learning is a slow one, as
every one is likely to know who has done enough of the papering work to
be able to read this book;--and as for that troublesome ladder, A. L. O.
E. will not venture to say that she has never had a tumble from it
herself. I need only mention, as regards lame Nelly, that in the end,
after days and weeks of patient labour, her house was very neatly
papered indeed.
Matty had far less trouble. The ladder of Spelling seemed made on
purpose to suit her convenience; she mounted the steps with greater
ease than even the active Dick could do. Her walls were soon covered
with fairies; but, as Lubin observed, no one could think the cottage of
Head well furnished with a paper so poor and thin,--you could almost see
the bricks through it. Matty was, however, well pleased; and even, in
the blindness of self-love, had some hopes of the silver crown. Pride
flattered her skill and her quickness, and was always a welcome guest at
her cottage as well as in Dick's. Neither the brother nor the sister yet
knew the evils that might arise from their using the paste of Emulation.
And how fared poor Lubin meantime? He worked slowly, by fits and starts,
whenever the humour was on him, but it seemed to his brother and sisters
as if his walls would never be papered. Nelly, after her own day's work,
would carry the ladder to Lubin, but he constantly refused to use it.
"What nonsense it is," he would angrily say, "to have words sounded in
one way, and spelt in another. I wish that the fellow who made that
ladder had been well ducked in the brook of Bother."
"But as it _has_ been made, and we've no other," observed Nelly, "would
it not be wise to make the best of it?"
By her gentle persuasion Lubin more than once attempted to mount the
first step, but it always gave way beneath him; he never could remember
of the _to_, _too_, and _two_, which was the right one to use.
At last, catching up the ladder in despair, Lubin flung it out of his
door.
"Let it go--I should like to break it to bits and make a bonfire of it!"
he cried; "I can paper my rooms without it."
"Oh, no; not the upper parts," suggested Nelly.
"I don't care for the upper parts, I'll leave them as they are,"
answered Lubin. "If the bricks and mortar are ugly, no one need look at
them, say I."
"But, Lubin," exclaimed Matty, who had just come in, "you will be quite
ashamed of your house if it be furnished worse than a ploughboy's."
"It will do very well," replied Lubin. "I hate this papering nonsense,
and I wish that Mr. Learning had been far enough away, rather than come
to plague us poor children with his tiresome Reading and Spelling!"