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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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to do the proprieties of Miss Ophelia’s chamber in a way with which even that particular lady could find no fault. Mortal hands could not lay spread smoother, adjust pillows more accurately, sweep and dust and arrange more perfectly, than Topsy, when she chose,- but she didn’t very often choose. If Miss Ophelia, after three or four days of careful and patient supervision, was so sanguine as to suppose that Topsy had at last fallen into her way, could do without overlooking, and so go off and busy herself about something else, Topsy would hold a perfect carnival of confusion, for some one or two hours. Instead of making the bed, she would amuse herself with pulling off the pillow-cases, butt- ing her woolly head among the pillows, till it would sometimes be grotesquely or- namented with feathers sticking out in various directions; she would climb the posts, and hang head downward from the tops; flourish the sheets and spreads all over the apartment; dress the bolster up in Miss Ophelia’s night-clothes, and enact various scenic performances with that,- singing and whistling, and making grim- aces at herself in the looking-glass; in short, as Miss Ophelia phrased it, “raising Cain” generally. On one occasion, Miss Ophelia found Topsy with her very best scarlet India Canton crape shawl wound round her head for a turban, going on with her rehears- als before the glass in great style,- Miss Ophelia having, with carelessness most unheard-of in her, left the key for once in her drawer. “Topsy!” she would say, when at the end of all patience, “what does make you act so?” |
