--My! Isn't it pretty?"

Pretty it was, and far, far more than pretty. To these unused eyes such
a scene as might have come from fairy-land. Even to Aunt Eunice, newly
admitted, the old barn seemed an unknown spot; and she sat enthroned
upon her seat of honor--an oat-bin transformed by cushions of straw and
sheaves of corn--amazed but equally delighted. The whole great structure
was ablaze with radiance. Susanna's clothes-line and Moses' grapevine
wire supported grinning Jacks innumerable. The glowing yellow heads
looked down from rafter and beam, peeped from the stalls, dangled from
stanchions. Between them gleamed also oddly shaped Chinese lanterns, and
these were a form of illumination wholly new to that inland village.
There were sheaves and vines and branches everywhere, and those who
observed could scarcely believe that the whole transformation, save and
beyond the carving of the pumpkins, had been wrought by three pairs of
young hands.

What cared happy Kitty Keehoty that of all her crisp ten dollars there
remained but thirteen cents? Hadn't they paid for all these shining
candles, those tubs of cream, the grotesque lanterns which her new
friends so admired, and the heaps of candy on the table at the far end
of the great floor? The table was improvised by a couple of planks laid
upon barrels and covered by a cloth borrowed from the linen closet. It
would have been covered with nothing else, save the candy and a pile of
wooden plates for the cream, had not Susanna produced her own
surprise--in such stores of cakes and sandwiches and toothsome dainties
as made the small giver of the function open her own eyes in amazement.

Oh, how delightful it all was! And didn't the pleasure in so many faces
more than pay for the ten dollars spent and the proudly weary widow's
hours at an oven door?

But how they came! So fast, so eager, so cordially willing to be
pleased! All the young guests who had been bidden by such a painful
outlay of pen and ink, and all their fathers and their mothers, "their
uncles and their aunts and their cousins!" All the merrier, all the
better, all the surer of success! For the best was yet to come. The
delicious, ambitious, loving secret scheme which had originated in the
teeming brain of Kitty Keehoty, and, aided and abetted by Montgomery,
her knight, was now to be divulged.

"My--suz!" quoth Susanna, dismayed by the vast proportions of
Katharine's "little party," "however--shall I give such