Page:Carroll Rankin--Dandelion Cottage.djvu/142

 120  with age; but inside it was cheerfulness personified. First, there was Mrs. Crane herself, fairly radiating comfort. Then there was a bright rag carpet on the floor, a glowing red cloth on the little table, a lively yellow canary named Dicksy in one window, and a gorgeous red and crimson, but very bad tempered parrot in the other. There were only three rooms downstairs and two bed chambers upstairs. Mrs. Crane's own room opened off the little parlour and visitors could see the high feather bed always as smooth and rounded on top as one of Mrs. Crane's big loaves of light bread. The privileged girls were never tired of examining the good woman's patchwork quilts made many years previously of minute, quaint old-fashioned scraps of calico.

Even the garden seemed to differ from other gardens, for every inch of it except the patch of green grass under the solitary cherry tree was given over to flowers, many of them as quaint and old-fashioned as the