Polly had a real knack for making things "do". Old empty
boxes, for instance, underwent marvellous transformations at her hands--
emerged, clad in chintz and muslin, as sofas and toilet-tables. She hung
her curtains on strings, and herself sewed the seams of the parlour
carpet, squatting Turk-fashion on the floor, and working away, with a
great needle shaped like a scimitar, till the perspiration ran down her
face. It was also she who, standing on the kitchen-table, put up the
only two pictures they possessed, Ned and Jerry giving opinions on the
straightness of her eye, from below: a fancy picture of the Battle of
Waterloo in the parlour; a print of "Harvey Discovering the Circulation
of the Blood" on the surgery wall.
From where he sat Mahony could hear the voices of the children--John's
children--at play. They frolicked with Pompey in the yard. He could
endure them, now that he was not for ever tumbling over them. Yes, one
and all were comfortably established under the new roof--with the
exception of poor Palmerston the cat. Palmerston had declined to
recognise the change, and with the immoderate homing-instinct of his
kind had returned night after night to his old haunts. For some time
Mahony's regular evening walk was back to the store--a road he would
otherwise not have taken; for it was odious to him to see Polly's neat
little appointments going to rack and ruin, under the tenancy of a dirty
Irish family. There he would find the animal sitting, in melancholy
retrospect.
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