Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/15

Rh though we, from long acquaintance, escape scot free, so do not stranger servants, who usually pitch head-foremost down one or other of the many pitfalls, and come heavily to grief. Our bedrooms are low and wide, opening one out of the other inconveniently enough, and they have latticed casements, through which the queen of flowers herself nods gaily in, reflecting herself in myriad shapes of crimson, yellow, white, and pink. Out of her beautiful breast drop those ugly parasites the earwigs, and make themselves very much at home among our hair-brushes and the simple appointments of our dressing-tables. As yet these latter are primitive enough: they hold a glass of flowers, a pincushion, a few trinket-cases, a ribbon or two, and that is all. We have no powder, or cosmetics, or appliances for painting the lily, but look in our glasses and see our faces, pretty or ugly, just as God made them. Alice's mirror gives back a dainty picture enough as she stands before it, tying the brown strings of her quakerish brown bonnet, that is just the colour of the soft love-locks that lie rich and smooth beneath. I wish that you could see her as she is at this moment, with the freshness of a wild rose in her exquisite cheeks, with the bloom of perfect health in her blue eyes, with the lovely severity of a sculptured Venus in the low white brow, and curved lips, and perfectly modelled cleft chin, and slender neck. We are very proud of our sixteen-year-old sister, our eldest and our only beauty! we are not a bad-looking family, people say, but none of us comes within a mile of Alice. Milly is handsome after a vigorous, determined fashion, with a pair of magnificent blue eyes, black lashed, and a shock of fair hair that sets straight out from her head in every direction. Now, if there is one thing for which we owe gratitude to the governor, it is for providing the family with such real, good, blue eyes. Reckoning his own and mother's, we number just twelve pairs among us; and by blue I do not mean that mixture of slate and grey, or green, so