"Don't feel badly!"said Miss Amelia."Certainly,I'll forgive you.I see you had no intention of giving offense,so none is taken.Get out your book and study hard on another lesson."That was surprising.I supposed I'd have to do the same one over,but I might take a new one.I was either getting along fast,or Miss Amelia had her fill of birds.I wiped my eyes as straight in front of me as I could slip up my handkerchief,and began studying the first lesson in my reader:"Pretty bee,pray tell me why,thus from flower to flower you fly,culling sweets the livelong day,never leaving off to play?"That was a poetry piece,and it was quite cheery,although it was all strung together like prose,but you couldn't fool me on poetry;I knew it every time.As I studied I felt better,and when Miss Amelia came to hear me she was good as gold.She asked if I liked honey,and I started to tell her about the queen bee,but she had no time to listen,so she said I should wait until after school.
Then we both forgot it,for when we reached home,the Princess'
horse was hitched to our rack,and I fairly ran in,I was so anxious to know what was happening.
I was just perfectly amazed at grown people!After all the things our folks had said!You'd have supposed that Laddie would have been locked in the barn;father reading the thirty second Psalm to the Princess,and mother on her knees asking God to open her eyes like Saul's when he tried to kick against the pricks,and make her to see,as he did,that God was not a myth,Well,there was no one in the sitting-room or the parlour,but there were voices farther on;so I slipped in.I really had to slip,for there was no other place they could be except the parlour bedroom,and Sally's wedding things were locked up there,and we were not to see until everything was finished,like I told you.
Well,this was what I saw:our bedroom had been a porch once,and when we had been crowded on account of all of us coming,father enclosed it and made a room.But he never had taken out the window in the wall.So all I had to do when I wanted to know how fast the dresses were being made,was to shove up the window above my bed,push back the blind,and look in.I didn't care what she had.I just wanted to get ahead of her and see before she was ready,to pay her for beating me.I knew what she had,and I meant to tell her,and walk away with my nose in the air when she offered to show me;but this was different.I was wild to see what was going on because the Princess was there.The room was small,and the big cherry four-poster was very large,and all of them were talking,so no one paid the slightest attention to me.
Mother sat in the big rocking chair,with Sally on one of its arms,leaning against her shoulder.Shelley and May and the sewing woman were crowded between the wall and the footboard,and the others lined against the wall.The bed was heaped in a tumble of everything a woman ever wore.Seemed to me there was more stuff there than all the rest of us had,put together.The working dresses and aprons had been made on the machine,but there were heaps and stacks of hand-made underclothes.I could see the lovely chemise mother embroidered lying on top of a pile of bedding,and over and over Sally had said that every stitch in the wedding gown must be taken by hand.The Princess stood beside the bed.A funny little tight hat like a man's and a riding whip lay on a chair close by.I couldn't see what she wore--her usual riding clothes probably--for she had a nip in each shoulder of a dress she was holding to her chin and looking down at.After all,I hadn't seen everything!Never before or since have I seen a lovelier dress than that.It was what always had been wrapped in the sheet on the foot of the bed and I hadn't got a peep at it.The pale green silk with tiny pink moss roses in it,that I had been thinking was the wedding dress,looked about right to wash the dishes in,compared with this.
This was a wedding dress.You didn't need any one to tell you.
The Princess had as much red as I ever had seen in her cheeks,her eyes were bright,and she was half-laughing and half-crying.
"Oh you lucky,lucky girl!"she was saying."What a perfectly beautiful bride you will be!Never have I seen a more wonderful dress!Where did you get the material?"Now we had been trained always to wait for mother to answer a visitor as she thought suitable,or at least to speak one at a time and not interrupt;but about six of those grown people told the Princess all at the same time how our oldest sister Elizabeth was married to a merchant who had a store at Westchester and how he got the dress in New York,and gave it to Sally for her wedding present,or she never could have had it.
The Princess lifted it and set it down softly."Oh look!"she cried."Look!It will stand alone!"There it stood!Silk stiff enough to stand by itself,made into a little round waist,cut with a round neck and sleeves elbow length and flowing almost to where Sally's knees would come.It was a pale pearl-gray silk crossed in bars four inches square,made up of a dim yellow line almost as wide as a wheat straw,with a thread of black on each side of it,and all over,very wide apart,were little faint splashes of black as if they had been lightly painted on.The skirt was so wide it almost filled the room.Every inch of that dress was lined with soft,white silk.There was exquisite lace made into a flat collar around the neck,and ruffled from sight up the inside of the wide sleeves.That was the beginning.The finish was something you never saw anything like before.It was a trimming made of white and yellow beads.There was a little heading of white beads sewed into a pattern,then a lacy fringe that was pale yellow beads,white inside,each an inch long,that dangled,and every bead ended with three tiny white ones.That went around the neck,the outside of the sleeves,and in a pattern like a big letter V all the way around the skirt.And there it stood--alone!
