from the church with her, and it
was many a year before she could manage to add to this slender store
anything to increase her gratitude for mercies given, though all the
time she was outwardly busy, cheerful, and helpful.

Justin had once come back to Edgewood, and it was the bitterest drop
in her cup of bitterness that she was spending that winter in Berwick
(where, so the neighbors told him, she was a great favorite in society,
and was receiving much attention from gentlemen), so that she had never
heard of his visit until the spring had come again. Parted friends
did not keep up with one another's affairs by means of epistolary
communication, in those days, in Edgewood; it was not the custom. Spoken
words were difficult enough to Justin Peabody, and written words were
quite impossible, especially if they were to be used to define his
half-conscious desires and his fluctuations of will, or to recount his
disappointments and discouragements and mistakes.

IV. It was Saturday afternoon, the 24th of December, and the weary
sisters of the Dorcas band rose from their bruised knees and removed
their little stores of carpet-tacks from their mouths. This was a
feminine custom of long standing, and as no village dressmaker had
ever died of pins in the digestive organs, so were no symptoms of
carpet-tacks ever discovered in any Dorcas, living or dead. Men wondered
at the habit and reviled it, but stood confounded in the presence of its
indubitable harmlessness.

The red ingrain carpet was indeed very warm, beautiful, and comforting
to the eye, and the sisters were suitably grateful to Providence, and
devoutly thankful to themselves, that they had been enabled to buy,
sew, and lay so many yards of it. But as they stood looking at their
completed task, it was cruelly true that there was much left to do.

The aisles had been painted dark brown on each side of the red strips
leading from the doors to the pulpit, but the rest of the church floor
was "a thing of shreds and patches." Each member of the carpet committee
had paid (as a matter of pride, however ill she could afford it) three
dollars and sixty-seven cents for sufficient carpet to lay in her own
pew; but these brilliant spots of conscientious effort only made the
stretches of bare, unpainted floor more evident. And that was not all.
Traces of former spasmodic and individual efforts desecrated the
present ideals. The doctor's pew had a pink-and-blue Brussels on it