Читать книгу The Library of Work and Play: Housekeeping - Elizabeth Hale Gilman - Страница 5

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Monday, I wash my dollies' clothes, And Tuesday, smoothly press them. Wednesday, I mend their little hose, And Thursday, neatly dress them. Friday, I play they're very ill, Saturday, something or other. Sunday, I say, "Lie still, I'm going to church with mother."

WHEN I was walking in a garden the other day, I saw a play-house. And what do you suppose it was? A big tree with humpy roots which stuck out of the ground, and low branches which nearly touched the grass at the ends. You could not stand up straight in the house if you were more than three feet tall, but as the people who lived in the house were only about two feet eleven inches, they did not mind that.

You should have seen the china-closet. It was under a bent root, and all the dishes were white with violet markings. One might have thought they were big and little and middling-sized clam-shells, if one had not seen them in a china-closet.

There was a bedroom between two big roots. A doll was taking a nap there, not on a pine-pillow, but on a whole bed of pleasant-smelling pine needles which had dropped off a tree in the neighbourhood. The mistress of the house was in the kitchen cooking, and the kitchen, of course, was where the sun came through a break in the branches. One must have a patch of sun in a kitchen, for how can you bake without it? When I went into this kitchen, there was a cake baking, with an ornament on the top that looked quite like an acorn.

I was invited to stay for lunch, and I will tell you what we had: First, there were brown-bread cutlets, and smooth white stone potatoes, and a wonderful salad made of maple leaves and pepper-grass. Then for dessert we had the cake I had seen baking, and milk. The cake had a brown layer made from the garden beds and a yellow layer made from the path, and was iced with white sand. You will guess that the brown bread cutlets and the milk were what people getting up plays call "practicable," which is just a grown-up word for "really and truly."

A tree is one of the nicest play-houses a person can have. But suppose it is a rainy day! We will play it is a rainy day, and we will go and go until we get to a house with a steep roof. And we will go in, and go upstairs, and then upstairs again until we get to a garret, where we can see the rafters sloping to the ridge over our heads, and the inside of the shingles. On the floor are trunks and boxes and barrels, and all sorts of things are hanging from the rafters. Sometimes we hear the pigeons running on the outsides of the shingles and cooing under the eaves. It is a lonely sound. It is rather dark, too, but we are brave, and we get past two saddles, and a row of white petticoats, and a dim place where there are a lot of old books with strange dark pictures in them, which one likes to be sure are shut in tight. At last we get round a corner and find a gable with a pointed window, and there is a play-house where a little girl and eight dolls live. There are four rooms in the play-house, though if you are not thinking, you may very likely walk right through the walls and not know it. On one side of the window is a bedroom, and on the other side is the kitchen. The dining room and the living room are in the corners nearest the rest of the garret.

The little girl's big sister put up some pictures on the sloping wooden walls to suit each room. One of them is very useful when the little girl is deciding what to play. It is seven little pictures on a card with verses to explain them. You can read the verses at the beginning of this chapter; I am sorry the pictures are not there, too.

This little girl likes especially to play "Monday, I wash my dollies' clothes"—because she has a tub and a washboard, and a wringer that will really let buttons through, and clothespins and a clothes-horse, and all the garret to put up lines in. Housework, you know, is so much more fun if you have the right things to do it with.

"Tuesday, I neatly press them," is a good day, too, but "Wednesday, I mend their little hose," is not. One cannot sit still and make believe sew, for many minutes. When mother was told about this trouble, she looked at the pictures and said, "Why, there's no sweeping day! As soon as the stockings are mended on Wednesday, you had better sweep, and tidy things up a little." Mother often wants things "tidied up" when it isn't in the game. She says, she does not keep her little girl's hat on the dining table, nor leave her bed unmade, and she cannot have the dolls brought up that way either.

The Friday game is one of the best. The two dolls that have night dresses are most often sick. Of course, it is a great care to have a doll sick, but it does make a great many interesting things to do. She may need cold-water cloths, or a hot-water bottle, or a poultice, and there is always medicine to give and meals to serve on a tray. Then the bed should be made over often. The little girl who lives in this play-house likes to have her dolls ill when she has company, because then there is some one to be the doctor.

"Saturday something or other," usually means cooking, and that, too, is a favourite game for company. Sometimes the little girl goes down into the "really and truly" kitchen to market, or sometimes mother sends up a little cake baked in a doll's pan. That makes a very grand occasion. The table must be laid with all the dishes, and napkins if possible, when there is a cake from the big kitchen.

A great many things can happen in a garret play-house, besides housekeeping. Sometimes it is so still up there, that one knows one must be in a deep forest, or out on the plains; and, of course, in that case, the cooking or nursing may be interrupted by a band of robbers, or an attack from Indians, or one may have a visit from an escaping prisoner, and besides, there are always long, dangerous journeys to take through the garret. In fact, every time one hears a new story, something unusual is likely to happen in the play-house.

Have you a play-house? I hope you have. Nowadays, when rents are so high, and when many people live in flats and apartments, it is often hard to get a play-house, but it can usually be managed in some way. If we have a nursery or a play-room all our own, then it is easy to have a play-house. We only have to get mother, or nurse to give us a corner to fix as we like, and to advise us about sorting things. Perhaps they will let us make the whole room into a play-house, but we really can keep house nicely in a much smaller space than that. The great point is to get the things together which belong together. If the bedroom things stand together, that is all we need to have a bedroom, and if the kitchen things are together, there is the kitchen. If we have a dining table, why, there is the dining room, and our living room can be anywhere where mother likes us to have most of the chairs.

But even if we have not a play-room we can still have a house. I know some clever dolls and their mother who keep house in the cupboard part of an old-fashioned washstand. The way they manage is to make the cupboard any room they wish to use. Monday morning it is a laundry, and every night it is a bedroom, and if they give a luncheon it is a dining room, and Saturday it is a kitchen. They keep the furniture which does not suit the room they are using in the drawer of the washstand which is over their heads.

I know another family who live under a dressing table. The legs of the table show where the corners of their house are, and they change the room into anything they need it for, as the other people do.

One little girl I know, whose name is Esther, lives in a flat and has only a bureau drawer for her housekeeping things. This is quite hard, for it means so much packing and unpacking, and parting with things she would like to keep when the drawer gets too full. She has to take her two dolls and a few things she thinks they will need into the parlour or the bedroom and play house there. In the bedroom, she plays it is night, because it is always nearly dark in there. Her mother lets her play with her big grown-up beds and chairs and stoves and irons. If she did not, Esther would have a hard time keeping house for her dolls.

But it is not always the people who live in flats who have not room for their things, is it? Sometimes after Christmas, or a birthday, one just feels as if one were trying to keep house in a toy shop. The best cure for this trouble is to give things away. Because—it is dreadful to think about—there are people who have no dolls: and there are people who have not so much as a tin cup to begin housekeeping with; and there are little girls who have real babies to look after, and real meals to cook who would just dearly love to have the games and toys that have to be packed away in closets and drawers because their owners have so many other things.

It is easy to say, give things away, but, my stars! how hard it is to decide which to give. One just can't give away the new things, and one feels so fond of the old ones, when one gets them out and looks at them. The only way to part with them is to think of Saint Martin cutting his cloak in two for the beggar, or something inspiring like that. Even then one feels a little dreary.

Once there was a little girl whose family moved into a smaller house. There was not room in her new play-house for the many things she had in her old one. Some of them had to be given away. One decision was so hard to make that she remembered about it after she was a grown-up woman. There was a little green wagon with yellow wheels, which she had always had, and which her older sisters had played with before she was born, and there was a little orange-coloured cart with four red wheels, which her father had brought out from town, a week or two before, filled with soap.

Two wagons were too many for the new play-house, and mother said keep the green one, because the other was only an "advertisement"; and the older sisters said keep the green one, because it was better and they had played with it; and father just smiled and said, "You must decide."

When no one was looking, the little girl took the little orange-coloured wagon with four red wheels, and the big letters round the outside, which made it an "advertisement," and put it in the box mother was packing for some other children, and it hurt so to do it that she could not quite help crying.

Some of us are troubled more with having too few things than too many, are we not? We can make a game of getting out of this trouble. We must all be discoverers and inventors, and if there is something needed in the play-house, we must keep our eyes wide open to see what else will do or what we can find to make into the thing we want. It spoils the hunt, and the surprise, if some one else tells you what to do, but one or two little things will show what the game is like. For instance, if it is a bed you need, try a strong pasteboard box, not very deep. If you mind its having no legs, then you must go on a journey and have it a berth on a car or a ship.

A cigar-box makes a good trunk for a small doll, especially the boxes which have trays in them. A doll with a cigar-box trunk will never have moths in her clothes.

Paper napkins are useful for dolls' tablecloths, and for napkins when they are cut into small squares. They will even do for sheets, if mother cannot spare us white "pieces" that are big enough. A bandanna handkerchief, or a scrap of bright calico, makes a good bedquilt.

Shells we have brought home from a day at the beach are convenient for dishes. Radiators are splendid stoves. And did you ever find out how much closet room there is under a bed? With the help of a few pins, one can hang all the dolls' clothes from the springs, and shut them in with the counterpane, if it happens to be a long one. But if mother does not want you to do this, you mustn't.

You will be able to make a great many discoveries and inventions, if you think what you want, and then think what to make it out of. But the best and most wonderful thing about a play-house is, that if we have to, we can make one anywhere, or out of anything. Once, two little girls wrote home about a visit they had paid, "We had two rag dolls and we played house." Even one little girl, without so much as a rag doll, can have a play-house. She has only to imagine, that is, pretend, and there it is—with rooms, and staircases, and people, and everything needful. It can be big or little; and in the country or in the city. She can do the washing, or give a dinner party; take care of a sick doll, or work in the garden, just as she pleases. It is easier and happier to play with the pleasant things people give us, and to be able to see and touch most of the things in our play-houses, but we always want some imagined things, too. And if it should happen that we are in a place where we "have nothing to play with," then we can imagine and pretend, and go and play in the play-house we always have with us. In a second, we can build it into a wigwam, or a palace, or a cave, or a great castle, or it can be just the house we live in when we are at home.

Sometimes, when we have played a good while in the play-house, we feel tired, and if it isn't a nap we want, perhaps it is that we would like to go and play in a play-house somebody else has made. We need not take a journey to do this, we only need some one to tell us a story, or a story-book to read to ourselves. We might choose to read "Cinderella," for that is the princess of housekeeping stories, or it may be that we will find one we like, if we go on reading this book.