most all of 'em is cracked over. I have lots o' fun lookin' at 'em an' seein' all the diff'rent patterns they git burnt into."
"Yes, an' that's why it takes you so long to wash up the dishes. If you don't hurry you're a-goin' to be tardy for school. The rest of us is a-fixin' to start naow, an' you'll have to run to ketch up."
"I ain't a-goin' to ketch up if I don't want to," returned Judith. "An' if I'm tardy, you hain't got no call to be a-frettin' yo'se'f."
This sort of bickering between Judith and her sisters went on daily in the Pippinger home and increased as the children grew older. Luella and Lizzie May, good, right-minded, docile little girls, looked down upon Judith from the height of two whole years of seniority and felt it their duty to try to make her as good, right-minded and docile as themselves.
There was a half-story attic above the three ground rooms occupied by the Pippingers, and this attic was the girls' bedroom. Here the three slept together in a big wooden bed made all of twisted spirals. The bed had a straw tick and in winter many thicknesses of patchwork quilts. In summer one quilt was enough and often too much; for the windows were small and the roof low; and on hot, breathless nights no air seemed to enter. In summer the bedbugs came out of the walls and Aunt Annie Pippinger saturated the bed once a month or so with kerosene and corrosive sublimate, the odor of which lingered for many days after the application. Between the windows stood an old cherry chest of drawers which had once been a handsome piece of furniture, but was now much scratched and scarred by hard usage. Each girl had one of the three drawers, and here they kept their clothes and treasures.
Luella and Lizzie May had each a pincushion of silk patchwork in the then popular "crazy" style, and fatly stuffed with bran. Luella had a box the lid of which was encrusted with small shells surrounding a red velvet pincushion shaped like a heart. In this box she kept carefully folded bits of silk, velvet and lace; locks of hair cut from the heads of all her relatives, wrapped in tissue paper and labeled with the name
