I once asked
a village maiden why the people made firewood of carved arm-chairs,
when painted pinewood, upholstered in American cloth, is, if lovelier,
not so lasting. Her reply was--"They get stalled on[3] 'em." And she
added: "Maybe a man 'll look at an old arm-chair that's stood on t'
hearth-place as long as he can remember, and he'll say--I'm fair sick
o' t' seet o' _yon_. We mun have a new 'un for t' Feast. _I'll chop
thee oop_!'"
[Footnote 3: "Stalled on" = tired of. "T' feast" = the village feast,
an annual festival and fair, for which most houses in that district
are cleaned within and whitewashed without.]
Possibly some of the Chippendale chairs also fell to the hatchet and
fed the flames, but most of them bore neglect as well as hardy
perennials, and when Queen Anne houses and "old Chips" came into
fashion again, there was routing and rummaging from attic to cellar,
in farmhouse and cottage, and the banished furniture went triumphantly
back to its own place.
I first saw single dahlias in some "little gardens" in Cheshire, five
or six years ago. No others had ever been cultivated there. In these
quiet nooks the double dahlia was still a new-fangled flower. If the
single dahlias yet hold their own, those little gardens must now find
themselves in the height of the floral fashion, with the unusual luck
of the conservative old woman who "wore her bonnet till the fashions
came round again.
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