[Illustration: THE WRECK OF A COASTER.]

UNCLE PHIL'S THIMBLE.

BY ELINOR ELLIOTT.

"A rag-picker!"

"That's just what I am," sighed a poor girl who stood at one of the long
tables in the rag-room of a large paper-mill. Down each side the table
stood a row of girls, some older, some younger, than herself, all
miserably clothed, and all with worn, pinched faces.

These girls came each day to their work with an eager look in their
eyes, which burned brightly in the morning, flickered fitfully through
the day, and faded out at night, leaving the patient, tired look which
want and hunger and disappointment bring, and which is always ready to
take courage and look forward once more; for in a pile of rags there
sometimes lay a treasure--an odd penny, an old knife, a pair of
scissors--something that might be taken to the little pawn shop round
the corner and sold.

A little while ago a girl--a _lucky_ girl--had a "find," a bright silver
quarter. Her good luck had been whispered up and down the row, but no
one betrayed her fortune. When the overseer came through the room, no
exultant look nor envious glance suggested anything unusual, for this
band of "rag-pickers" had its honor, which it held to as closely as the
most compact trades-union in the land.

To some of the girls the thought sometimes came, "Is what we find really
ours?" but long generations of workers in the mill had appropriated
these "finds," and it had become a custom if not a right.

To-day Nance, at the head of the table, felt a keener longing than usual
to secure something. She had never felt the utter dreariness of her
loneliness and poverty so strongly as she had in the last bright
Christmas season, which had been to her only a vision; not the sweet
reality that it becomes to us, who bring it close to us in happy
anticipation weeks before it really comes, who live in its light and
peace and cheer, in its sweet givings and receivings, and keep its
memory with us throughout the year.

For a whole year Nance had been at work in the mill, and had had
nothing but her regular five-cent salary. Now her long nervous fingers
ran rapidly through the pieces, making four divisions, as she called;
"Linen, cotton, woollen, silk--linen, cotton, woollen, silk," and the
different bits dropped into their proper piles like falling leaves;
while the girl on her right took the cottons, and assorted them, and the
girl on her left went through the woollens in th