A little later she arranged the table.
She swept it with a broom, instead of laying a cloth; took the hatchet and hammered the deepest dents from the tin plates, and nearly skinned her fingers scouring the tinware with rushes.

She set the plates an even distance apart, and laid the forks and spoons beside them.

When the cook threw away half a dozen fruit-cans, she gathered them up and melted off the tops, although she almost blistered her face and quite blistered her fingers doing it.

Then she neatly covered these improvised vases with the Manila paper from the groceries, tying it with wisps of marshgrass.
These she filled with fringed gentians, blazing-star, asters, goldenrod, and ferns, placing them the length of the dining-table.

In one of the end cans she arranged her red leaves, and in the other the fancy grass.
Two men, watching her, went away proud of themselves and said that she was "a born lady." She laughingly caught up a paper bag and fitted it jauntily to her head in imitation of a cook's cap.