A position for sleep is, unluckily, the one that is sure to keep one awake. Lying down, all the blood in my body kept rushing to my brain, keeping up perpetual images of noun substantives. If I could have spent my fifty dollars in verbs, in taking a journey, in giving a _fête champêtre_! (Garden lighted with Chinese lanterns, of course,--house covered inside and out with roses.) Things enough, indeed, there were to be bought. But the right thing!
A house, a park, a pair of horses, a curricle, a pony-phaëton. But how many feet of ground would fifty dollars buy?--and scarcely the hoof of a horse.
There was a diamond ring. Not for me; because "he" had been too poor to offer me one. But I could give it to him. No,--that wouldn't do. He wouldn't wear it,--nor a pin of ditto. He had said, simplicity in dress was good economy and always good taste. No. Then something else,--that wouldn't wear, wouldn't tear, wouldn't lose, rust, break.
As to clothes, to which I swung back in despair,--this very Aunt Allen had always sent us all our clothes. So it would only be getting more, and wouldn't seem to be anything. She was an odd kind of woman,--generous in spots, as most people are, I believe. Laura and I both said, (to each other,) that, if she would allow us a hundred dollars a year each, we could dress well and suitably on it. But, instead of that, she sent us every year, with her best love, a trunk full of her own clothes, made for herself, and only a little worn,--always to be altered, and retrimmed, and refurbished: so that, although worth at first perhaps even more than two hundred dollars, they came, by their unfitness and non-fitness, to be worth to us only three-quarters of that sum; and Laura and I reckoned that we lost exactly fifty dollars a year by Aunt Allen's queerness. So much for our gratitude! Laura and I concluded it would be a good lesson to us about giving; and she had whispered to me something of the same sort, when I insisted on dressing Betsy Ann Hemmenway, a little mulatto, in an Oriental caftan and trousers, and had promised her a red sash for her waist. To be sure, Mrs. Hemmenway despised the whole thing, and said she "wouldn't let Betsy Ann be dressed up like a circus-rider, for nobody"; and that she should "wear a bonnet and mantilly, like the rest of mankind." Which, indeed, she did,--and her bonnet rivalled the _coiffures_ of Paris in brilliancy and procrastination; for it never came in sight till long after its little mistress. However, of that by-and-by. I was only too glad that Aunt Allen had not sent me another silk gown "with her best love, and, as she was only seventy, perhaps it might be useful." No,--here was the fifty-dollar note, thank Plutus!