Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/196

 furniture for which there was no room below, there was still left a vacant space of sufficient size for a couple of cotillions.

At one end of the apartment was a platform about a foot high for the use of the musicians in “the brave days of old.” Upon this dais, feeling like one of royal birth, I placed my bedstead. Tom, upon beholding it, immediately dubbed my part of the room “Mrs. Boffin’s Bower.”

Suspecting spiders in the roof, we tacked large sheets to the rafters above each bed,—canopies that added to the general effect; the one above the dais looked so grand that I felt a sort of awe of it myself. As a finishing touch, a few rugs were scattered over the floor. The decorative artist, turning to leave, paused in the doorway for a critical examination of the “altogether,” and was forced to the conclusion that a bedroom in a barn would have been quite as attractive.

Up to this time it had been raining steadily, though gently, for days; but the morning my great work was completed it began pouring in torrents, growing worse toward evening, with a strong wind blowing straight from the ocean, something very unusual here.

When Tom had finished his evening work and was standing on the porch, shaking the rain from his storm-coat, he called out, “A fine night for the Abbey, Katharine!”

“Yes, won’t it be glorious?” I responded with