The Dolls’ House Read Online Free PDF

made of real oak – it said so – and they were red velvet too.’
    ‘And there was a table,’ said Charlotte dreamily, ‘and it had a red runner and a fringe.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Emily.
    ‘Yes,’ said Charlotte.
    ‘Yes,’ said the Plantaganets.
    ‘I shall have sixpence for my tooth when it comes out,’ said Charlotte.
    ‘Oh, Charlotte! Don’t be silly,’ said Emily. ‘Those were terribly expensive.’
    ‘Then – we shall have to have ordinary lace and chairs.’
    ‘Oh no!’ cried Mr Plantaganet. ‘Oh no! Please no!’
    ‘I don’t mind ordinary chairs,’ said Birdie. ‘I can make do with anything.’
    ‘We can’t,’ said Emily. ‘We shan’t.’
    ‘But – what shall we do?’
    ‘We shall do what other people do when they want things,’ said Emily. ‘We must make money.’
    ‘But how?’ asked Charlotte.
    ‘How?’ asked all the Plantaganets.
    ‘Somehow,’ said Emily.

Chapter 6
    Tottie and the dolls’ house were not the only things in the house that had belonged to Emily and Charlotte’s great-grandmother and Great-Great-Aunt Laura. There
was, as well, a sampler.
    ‘What is a sampler?’ asked Apple.
    ‘It is a needlework picture to hang on a wall,’ Tottie explained to him. ‘It is all worked in cross-stitch on fine canvas and sometimes most times the stitches are very fine
indeed. Do you remember, in The Tailor of Gloucester ,’ asked Tottie, ‘when it says, “the stitches were so small – so small, that they could only have been made
by mice’? Well, the stitches in samplers look like that, but they were not made by mice,’ said Tottie. ‘They were made by little girls; and hours and hours of stitching went into
them. They had letters and alphabets and a great deal of writing. I remember them well,’ said Tottie. ‘I feel glad that little girls do not have to make them now,’ said Tottie.
    Great-Grandmother’s sampler hung in the children’s room. It was long in shape and framed in a narrow wooden frame. It was worked in baskets of flowers on a cream background, and it had
a verse that said in tiny pale-blue stitches:
    Fain am I to work these nosegays
    Gathered from my tranquil days
    In gentle rain, mild storm and sunny weather ,
    A friend to flower, flesh and fur and feather ,
    Content, please God, my time on earth to dwell
    Till death shall claim me and I say farewell .
    ‘I remember those f ’s,’ said Tottie. ‘They gave her a great deal of trouble.’
    Charlotte did not like to look at the sampler, she said it gave her a headache and she did not understand the poem in the least, but Emily liked it. Sometimes she begged Mother to give her a
certain little set of clothes, Tottie’s first clothes, as old as the sampler. These clothes were not beautiful ones like Marchpane’s; they were the ordinary clothes that might have been
made for any little doll in those times: a bodice with infinitesimal tucks where stay-bones should have been, a pair of long-legged drawers scalloped to match, and a dress of India muslin
embroidered in blue flowers, and a very little blue bonnet to mach that had white embroidery that looked like quilling on the edge. Emily liked to dress Tottie in these and stand her underneath the
sampler.
    ‘Let’s put her there today, Charlotte,’ said Emily next afternoon. ‘Mrs Innisfree is coming to tea.’
    Both the children loved Mrs Innisfree, who was gay and serious as need arose and who was always interested in their dolls. Emily dressed Tottie and stood her under the sampler and even wrote a
ticket that said, not unlike the cleaners’ notice for Marchpane: Example of a real old sampler worked by a little girl in 1846 .
    ‘Poor little girl,’ said Charlotte indignantly.
    Emily took no notice. She wrote: Example of a farthing doll, dressed by that same little girl in 1846 .
    ‘Her mother must have helped her,’ said Charlotte. ‘No little girl could make that quilling. You ought to put in about the mother, Emily.’
    ‘Well,