looking ahead, the fruit that was to be borne from it, how
would his anxious soul have thanked God and taken courage!

In this mood came Flossy to listen to the story of "The Parish of Fair
Haven," as it flowed down to her in Mrs. Miller's smooth-toned musical
voice. One who comes from her knees to listen is sure to find the seed
if it has been put in. Flossy found hers.

Often in the course of her young life she had been at church and sat in
the attitude of listener while a missionary sermon was preached. She had
heard, perhaps, ten sentences from those sermons, not ten consecutive
sentences, but words scattered here and there through the whole; from
these she had gathered that there was to be a collection taken for the
cause of Missions. Just where the money was to go, and just what was to
be done with it when it arrived, what had been accomplished by
missionary effort, what the Christian world was hoping for in that
direction--all these things Flossy Shipley knew no more about than her
kitten did.

Perhaps it was not strange then, that although abundantly supplied with
pin-money, she had never in her life given anything to the work of
Missions. Not that she would not willingly have deposited some of her
money in the box for whatever use the authorities chose to make of it
had she happened to have any; but young ladies as a rule have been
educated to imagine that there is one day in the week in which their
portmonnaies can be off duty. There being no shopping to be done, no
worsteds to match, no confectionary to tempt what earthly use for money?
So it was locked up at home. This, at least, is the way in which Flossy
Shipley had argued, without knowing that she argued at all.

Now she was looking at things with new eyes; the same things that she
had heard of hundreds of times, but how different they were! What a
remarkable scheme it was, this carrying the story of Jesus to those
miserable ignorant ones, getting them ready for the heaven that had been
made ready for them! The people of "Fair Haven" did not appear to her
like lunatics, as they did to Ruth Erskine. She was not, you will
remember, of the class who had argued this question in their ignorance,
and quieted their consciences with the foolish assertion that the church
collections went to pay secretaries and treasurers and erect splendid
public buildings. She belonged, rather, to that less hopeless class who
had never thought at all. Now, as she listened, he