The Day She Asked for Our Front Door

Mr. Butterwick called in to see me the other day, and in the course of the conversation he said:

"I'm going to move. I can't stand those Thompsons next door to me any longer. They're the awfullest people to borrow things that I ever saw. Coffee and butter, sugar and flour I don't mind so much, although when a woman borrows high priced sugar and Java Coffee and sends back sand and chicory, a man naturally feels bilious and mad.

But they're borrowed pretty near everything in the house. First it's one thing then it's another, item morning till night, right straight along.

Now there's the poker. A poker is a piece of machinery that you would think anybody might go around and buy, or, if they couldn't afford it, they might use a fence paling to shake up the fire. But Mrs. Thompson seems to banker after our poker. She borrows it fifteen or twenty times a day, and last Sunday she sent for it thirty-four times. She pays a boy $2 a week to run over and borrow that poker, and she's used it so much that its all bent up like work screw.

Now, take chairs for instance. She asks us to lend her our chairs three times a day at every meal, and she borrows the rocking chair whenever she wants to put the baby to sleep.

A couple of times she sent over for sofa, and when the boy came back with it he said Mrs. Thompson was mad as thunder, and kept growling round the house all day because there were no castors on it. Last Monday she borrowed our wash boiler and we had to put off our washing till Tuesday. She did her preserving in it, and the consequence was all of our clothes were full of peaches. I've got on an under-shirt now that I'm mighty doubtful if I'll ever get off, it's stuck to me so tight.

Every now and then she has company, and then she borrows our hired girl and all the parlor furniture once because I would not carry the piano over for her and take down the chandelier she told our girl that there were rumors about town that I was a reformed pirate.

Perfectly scandalous! They think nothing of sending over utter a couple of bedsteads or the entry carpet, and the other day Thompson says to me:

'Butterwick, does your pump log pull up easy?'

And when I said I thought it did, he said

'Well, I would like to borrow it, for a few days till I can got one, for mine's all rotted away.'

The only wonder to me in that he didn't try to borrow the well along with it.

And then on Tuesday Mrs. Thompson sent that boy over to know if Mrs. Butterwick wouldn't lend her our front door. She said theirs was way being painted and she was afraid the baby would catch cold. When I asked him what he supposed we were going to do to keep comfortable without any front door, he said Mrs. Thompson said she reckoned we might tack up a bedquilt or something. And when I refused, the boy said Mrs. Thompson told him if I wouldn't send over the front door to ask Mrs. Butterwick to lend her it pair of striped stockings and a horsehair hustle and to borrow the cool scuttle till Monday.

What in the name of Muses she is going to do with a hustle and a cool scuttle I can't conceive.

But, they're the most extraordinary people! Last Fourth of July the boy came over and told Mrs. Butterwick that Mrs. Thompson would be much obliged if she'd lend her the twins for a few minutes. She said her Thompson wanted them to suck at a new bottle top, because it made her baby sick to make fresh india-rubber. Cheeky, wasn't it? But that's her way. She don't mind it any more.

Why, I've known her to take off our Johnny's pants 'em he's been playing there with the children, and send him home barelegged to tell his mother that she borrowed them for a pattern. And on Thompson's birthday she said her house was so small for a party that if we'd lend her ours we might come late in the evening and dance with the company. If we wouldn't, let on that we lived there.

Yes, sir; I'm going to move. I'd rather live next door to a lunatic asylum than have the maniacs pouring red hot shot over the fence every hour of the day. Indeed I would."