thdays! But this little old,
old visitor seemed to have had but one.

"My birthday is two days quicker than Aunt 'Livia's is," volunteered
the visitor, sociably. "We're 'most twins, you see. Aunt 'Livia
was fifty-six that time she gave me the present. She's agoing to be
fifty-nine when I give her this quilt--it's taken me ever since to make
it."

The minister's wife looked up from her cutting. So Rebecca Mary was only
fifty-nine!

"It's quite a long quilt," sighed Rebecca Mary. But pride woke in her
eyes as she gazed out on the splendors of the green and purple sea.
"A Thousand Quilt has so many stitches in it, but when you sew'em all
yourself--when you sew every single stitch--" The pride in Rebecca
Mary's grave blue eyes grew and grew.

"Robert," the minister's wife said that night to the minister, "it's an
awful quilt, but you ought to have seen her eyes! It's taken her three
years to make it--maybe you wouldn't be proud yourself!"

"Maybe YOU wouldn't, if Rhoda had made it."

"RHODA! Robert, she sewed one square of patchwork once and it made
her sick. I had to put her to bed. Speaking of 'once' reminds me--once
Rebecca Mary had a birthday present, Robert." She waited a little
anxiously for him to understand. The minister always understood, but
sometimes he made her wait.

"Felicia, are you trying to make me cry?" he said, and she was
satisfied. She went across to him, as she always did when she wanted
to cry herself. The floor was strewn with the tiniest boy's engine and
cars, and she remembered, as she zigzagged among them, that they had
been one of his very last birthday presents.

"It was--Robert, what do you think the present was? I'll give you three
guesses, but I advise you to guess a rooster."

"Thomas Jefferson," murmured the minister, as one who was acquainted.

"Yes, that is his name. How did you remember? She is very fond of
him--he is her intimatest friend, she says. So she is under great
obligations to her aunt. It's a large quilt, but it's none too large to
'cover' Thomas Jefferson. I'm going to help her buy a lining and cotton
batting."

"Cracked corn will make a good lining, but cotton bat--"

"Robert, this is not a comedy! If you'd seen Rebecca Mary, and the
quilt, you'd call it a tragedy. You couldn't surprise me any if you told
me she'd quilted it herself!"

Down the road from Aunt Olivia's farm, across its southern boundary
fence, romped and shouted all day long the Tony Trumbull