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Blue Wednesday The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day — a day to be awaited with dread , endured with courage and forgotten with haste . Every floor must be spotless , every chair dustless , and every bed without a wrinkle . Ninety - seven squirming little orphans must be scrubbed and combed and buttoned into freshly starched ginghams ; and all ninety - seven reminded of their manners , and told to say , ' Yes , sir , ' ' No , sir , ' whenever a Trustee spoke . It was a distressing time ; and poor Jerusha Abbott , being the oldest orphan , had to bear the brunt of it . But this particular first Wednesday , like its predecessors , finally dragged itself to a close . Jerusha escaped from the pantry where she had been making sandwiches for the asylum's guests , and turned upstairs to accomplish her regular work . Her special care was room F , where eleven little tots , from four to seven , occupied eleven little cots set in a row . Jerusha assembled her charges , straightened their rumpled frocks , wiped their noses , and started them in an orderly and willing line towards the dining - room to engage themselves for a blessed half hour with bread and milk and prune pudding . Then she dropped down on the window seat and leaned throbbing temples against the cool glass . She had been on her feet since five that morning , doing everybody's bidding , scolded and hurried by a nervous matron . Mrs . Lippett , behind the scenes , did not always maintain that calm and pompous dignity with which she faced an audience of Trustees and lady visitors . Jerusha gazed out across a broad stretch of frozen lawn , beyond the tall iron paling that marked the confines of the asylum , down undulating ridges sprinkled with country estates , to the spires of the village rising from the midst of bare trees . The day was ended — quite successfully , so far as she knew . The Trustees and the visiting committee had made their rounds , and read their reports , and drunk their tea , and now were hurrying home to their own cheerful firesides , to forget their bothersome little charges for another month . Jerusha leaned forward watching with curiosity — and a touch of wistfulness — the stream of carriages and automobiles that rolled out of the asylum gates . In imagination she followed first one equipage , then another , to the big houses dotted along the hillside . She pictured herself in a fur coat and a velvet hat trimmed with feathers leaning back in the seat and nonchalantly murmuring ' Home ' to the driver . But on the door - sill of her home the picture grew blurred . Jerusha had an imagination — an imagination , Mrs . Lippett told her , that would get her into trouble if she didn't take care — but keen as it was , it could not carry her beyond the front porch of the houses she would enter . Poor , eager , adventurous little Jerusha , in all her seventeen years , had never stepped inside an ordinary house ; she could not picture the daily routine of those other human beings who carried on their lives undiscommoded by orphans .
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