But everything was so
polished up and cleaned, the walls re-papered with a soft grey-green
paper spangled with dog-daisies, and the room so brightened up with
fresh blinds and bedclothes, and a bit of bright carpet, that it did
not look in the least dismal, and Charlie was very proud and very fond
of it. It had two windows, one where the beehive was, and one very sunny
one, where he had a balm of Gilead that Isaac's wife gave him, and his
old medicine-bottles full of cuttings on the upper ledge. The old women
used to send him "slippings" off their fairy roses and myrtles and
fuchsias, and they rooted very well in that window, there was so much
sun.
Charlie had only just begun a fern collection, and I had saved my
pocket-money (I did not want it for anything else) and had bought him
several quires of cartridge-paper; and Dr. Brown had given him a packet
of medicine-labels to cut up into strips to fasten his specimens in
with, and the collection looked very well and very scientific; and all
that remained was to find a good place to put it away in. The drawers of
the press were of all shapes and sizes, but there were two longish very
shallow ones that just matched each other, and when I pulled one of them
out, and put the fern-papers in, they fitted exactly, and the drawer
just held half the collection.
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