Page:Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Volume 2.djvu/92

74 Amanda sighed months afterward for a Breton collar and cross of charming antiquity and ugliness.

Matilda boldly planted her camp-stool, unfurled her umbrella, and, undaunted by the crowd of round-capped, blue-bloused, wooden-shoed children about her, began to draw the church.

"I intend to study architecture, and to sketch all the cathedrals we see," said the ardent art-student, struggling manfully with the unruly umbrella, the unsavory odors from the gutter, and the garrulous crowd leaning over her shoulder, peering under her hat-brim, and examining all her belongings with a confiding freedom rather embarrassing.

"Do you know what impertinent things these little scamps are saying to you?" asked Amanda, pausing in a lecture on surface drainage which she was delivering to Lavinia, who was vainly struggling to cram a fat wine bottle, a cabbage leaf of strawberries, and some remarkable cakes into the lunch-basket.

"No: I don't; and that is the advantage of not knowing any language but my own," complacently replied Matilda, who considered all study but that of art, as time wasted, and made her small store of