3stalwarts Read Online Free PDF Page A

brought a complete outfit,” he said. She felt a little shy, replying, “I told Mother there wasn’t any sense in me bringing a lot of clothes, and such things. I told her I’d rather have the money spent in house things.”
    The cabin lost its dreariness when they had the dresser set up against the wall beside the fireplace, with its dishes laid out on the shelves. It was one her father had made of pine in his young married days, with scalloped mouldings, but it had been put by upstairs years before when he brought home the maple cupboard he bought in Caughnawaga. It had seemed like an old and clumsy piece. When Lana asked for it, her mother had been glad to let it go. But now, in its new place, the dresser looked impressively handsome. It gave Lana a comforting feeling to see it there, and to think that her father and mother must have admired it together in their first house.
    On its shelves she placed her brown earthenware plates, the baking dish, and the six glasses from Albany. On the top shelf out of harm’s way she put the Bible and the white china teapot that had been her Grandmother Lana’s, and the peacock’s feather that her mother had given her out of the cluster of six, so that she should have a reminder of home always in sight. War on sea or land could not affect its fantastical colors.
    When Mrs. Weaver saw it first, she held up both her hands and marveled stridently.
    “It’s like the feather off an angel’s wing. You say it come from an actual bird?”
    “Oh, yes,” said Lana.
    “What might such a bird be called?”
    “A peacock, Mrs. Weaver.”
    “Think of that!” exclaimed Mrs. Weaver. “I wonder what he looks like.”
    “I couldn’t say.”
    “Would they be wing feathers, do you suppose?”
    “My mother had an uncle who went to sea,” said Lana modestly. “He said it was off the peacock’s tail. Mother inherited them. She has five at home.”
    “You certainly know a lot,” Mrs. Weaver said admiringly.
    Mrs. Weaver made Lana feel very proud. She examined all the other fixings of the cabin with a new respect; she went upstairs into the loft and sat upon the bed, bouncing a little.
    “That’s a dandy bed,” she said.
    “Mother made it for me. It’s all genuine white goose.”
    “God! Imagine! I ain’t seen a genuine white goose since I come up here. Your Ma must have been a knowing person, Mrs. Martin.”
    She tried the spinning wheel, saying it ran nice but felt a little light for a woman like herself. “I’ll bet, though, that a dancey body like yourself would get a first-rate tone out of it.”
    But what inevitably attracted her was the peacock’s feather. She stopped again before it, holding her hands before her petticoat, tight down against her legs. Her curving nose looked rigid with the wonder of it. Her kindly mouth was hushed. Her gray eyes shone. Beside her Lana looked small and young and frail.
    “My,” said Mrs. Weaver. “I’ll have to tell George about it right away.”
    As a result, George Weaver came at noon, a bulky, square-faced man, with solid wrists and a deliberate way of talking. He stood before the feather, breathing loudly through his nose, for quite a while, before he turned to Lana and Gil.
    “A man could hardly paint a thing like that,” he said, pointing to the heart-shape in the eye. He shook his head. “No, sir, not hardly. You’ve married yourself quite a girl, Gil.”
    His slow, good-humored eyes fixed themselves on Lana with respect. “Would you mind showing that thing to John and Cobus sometime, ma’am?”
    “Why, I’d be glad,” said Lana.
    “I’ll send them over sometime, then,” he said.
    “You ought to tell Demooth,” Mrs. Weaver said. “I’d like to have his Missis look at that. Maybe she won’t feel so fine and mighty.”
    “Now Emmy,” said her husband in his slow fashion. “She ain’t so bad. It’s just the way she talks.”
    Mrs. Weaver snorted.
    “Anyways,” she said, “if you stand there admiring all