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Listen to the gypsy’s warning,
Gentle lady, heed him not.”
The other new song was, “When I Was One and Twenty, Nell, and You Were Seventeen.” It was Mr. Boast’s favorite song. He had been twenty-one when he met Mrs. Boast, and she had been seventeen. Her name was really Ella, but Mr. Boast called her Nell.
At last the five pasteboard pieces were neatly covered with rows above rows of the little paper points, and no stitches showed except along the top of the top row. Then Mrs. Boast sewed a wide strip of the brown paper above these stitches and folded it over to hide them.
Finally, they tacked each pasteboard curtain to its shelf. The stiff scallops, covered with the stiff little paper points, hung down stiffly. Then Pa carefully painted the whole whatnot, and all the little paper points, a rich, dark brown. When the paint dried, they set the whatnot in the corner behind Mary’s chair.
“So that’s a whatnot,” Pa said.
“Yes,” said Ma. “Isn’t it pretty?”
“It’s a neat job,” said Pa.
“Mrs. Boast says they’re all the rage in Iowa,” she told him.
“Well, she ought to know,” Pa agreed. “And there’s nothing in Iowa too good for you, Caroline.”
But the best time of all was after supper. Every evening Pa played the fiddle, and now Mr. Boast’s and Mrs. Boast’s beautiful voices rounded out the singing. Gaily Pa played and sang:
“When I was young and single,
I could make the money jingle
And the world went well with me then,
O then! The world went well with me then.
“I married me a wife, O then! O then!
I married me a wife, O then!
I married me a wife, she was the joy of my life,
And the world went well with me then!”
The song went on to say that she was not such a good wife after all, so Pa never sang the rest of it. His eyes twinkled at Ma while the music laughed and whirled and then he would sing:
“She can make a cherry pie,
Billy boy! Billy boy!
She can make a cherry pie,
Charming Billy.
She can make a cherry pie
With a twinkle in her eye
But she’s a young thing
And cannot leave her mother.”
The music would go rollicking while only Pa and Mr. Bo
ast sang:
