“It's got letters on it and I can read them! PAT, Pat!”
“Oh, Charles, you shouldn't!” Ma said.
Pa hugged her. “Don't you worry, Caroline!” he told her.
“I never have worried, Charles,” Ma answered. “But building such a house, and glass windows, and buying a stove—it's too much.”
“Nothing's too much for you,” said Pa.
“And don't worry about the expense. Just look through that glass at that wheat-field!”
But Laura and Mary pulled her to the cookstove. She lifted the lids as Laura showed her, she watched while Mary worked the draught, she looked at the oven.
“My!” she said. “I don't know if I dare try to get dinner on such a big, beautiful stove!”
But she did get dinner on that wonderful stove and Mary and Laura set the table in the bright, airy room. The glass windows were open, air and light came in from every side, and sunshine was streaming in through the doorway and the shining window beside it.
It was such fun to eat in that big, airy, light house that after dinner they sat at the table, just enjoying being there.
“Now this is something like!” Pa said.
Then they put up the curtains. Glass windows must have curtains, and Ma had made them of pieces of worn-out sheets, starched crisp and white as snow. She had edged them with narrow strips of pretty calico. The curtains in the big room were edged with pink strips from Carrie's little dress that had been torn when the oxen ran away. The bedroom curtains were edged with strips from Mary's old blue dress. That was the pink calico and the blue calico that Pa brought home from town, long ago in the Big Woods.
While Pa was driving nails to hold the strings for the curtains, Ma brought out two long strips of brown wrapping-paper that she had saved. She folded them, and she showed Mary and Laura how to cut tiny bits out of the folded paper with the scissors. When each unfolded her paper, there was a row of stars.
Ma spread the paper on the shelves behind the stove. The stars hung over the edges of the shelves, and the light shone through them.
When the curtains were up, Ma hung two snowy-clean sheets across a corner of the bedroom. That made a nice place where Pa and Ma could hang their clothes. Up in the attic, Ma put up another sheet that Mary and Laura could hang their clothes behind.
The house was beautiful when Ma had finished. The pure-white curtains were looped back on each side of the clear glass windows.
Between those pink-edged, snowy curtains the sunshine streamed in. The walls were all clean, piny-smelling boards, with the skeleton of the house against them, and the ladder going up to the attic. The cookstove and its stovepipe were glossy black, and in that corner were the starry shelves.
Ma spread the between-meals red-checked cloth on the table, and on it she set the shining-clean lamp. She laid there the paper-covered Bible, the big green Wonders of the Animal World, and the novel named Millbank. The two benches stood neatly by the table.
The last thing, Pa hung the bracket on the wall by the front window, and Ma stood the little china shepherdess on it.
That was the wood-brown bracket that Pa had carved with stars and vines and flowers, for Ma's Christmas long ago. That was the same smiling little shepherdess, with golden hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks, her little china bodice laced with china-gold ribbons and her little china apron and her little china shoes. She had traveled from the Big Woods all the way to Indian Territory, and all the way to Plum Creek in Minnesota, and there she stood smiling. She was not broken. She was not nicked nor even scratched. She was the same little shepherdess, smiling the same smile.
That night Mary and Laura climbed the ladder and went to bed by themselves in their large, airy, very own attic. They did not have curtains because Ma had no more old sheets.
But each had a box to sit on, and each had a box to keep her treasures in. Charlotte and the paper dolls lived in