ible till you try?" demanded the girl,
laughing. "How much would you give, yourself, toward a new instrument?"

Mr. Scribner winked hard, swallowed, and burst out with: "Ten dollars!
Yes, ma'am! I'd go without a new winter overcoat for the sake of having
a decent piano."

"That's a beginning," Janice said, gravely, seizing paper and pad. "And
I can spare five. Now, don't you see, if we can interest everybody else
in town proportionately, we'd have enough to buy _two_ pianos, let alone
one.

"But let us start the subscription papers with our own offerings. You
take one, and I'll take the other. You can ask everybody who comes into
the store, and I'll go out into the highways and hedges and see what I
can gather."

Janice interested the young people's society in the project, too; and
her own enthusiasm, plus that of the other young folks, brought the
thing about. At the usual Sunday-school entertainment on Christmas night
the new piano was used for the first time, and Mrs. Ebbie Stewart, who
played it, fairly cried into her score book, she was so glad.

"I was _so_ sick of pounding on that old tin-panny thing!" she sobbed.
"A real piano seems too good to be true."

The old Town Hall standing at the head of High Street--just where the
street forked to become two country highways--had a fine stick of spruce
in front of it for a flagpole; but on holidays the flag that was raised
(if the janitor didn't forget it) was tattered like a battle-banner,
and, in addition, was of the vintage of a score of years before. Our
flag has changed some during the last two decades as to the number of
stars and their arrangement on the azure field.

Of a sudden people began to notice the need of a new flag. Who mentioned
it first? Why, that Day girl!

And she kept right on mentioning it until some people began to see that
it was really a disgrace to Poketown--and almost an insult to the flag
itself--to raise such a tattered banner. A grand silk flag, with new
halyards and all, was finally obtained, the Congressman of the district
having been interested in the affair. And on Washington's Birthday the
Congressman himself visited the village and made an address when the
flag was raised for the first time.

Gradually, other improvements and changes had taken place in Poketown.
There was the steamboat dock. It had been falling to pieces for years.
It had originally been built by the town; but the various storekeepers
were most benefited