face blackened. "You might as well," she told them, "laugh at the funny
faces of a person who's choking to death!"

The urbane city people turned amused and inquiring faces upon her. "How
so?"

"Roads aren't for grass to grow in!" she fulminated.
"They're for folks to use, for men and women and little children to go over
to and from their homes."

"Ah, economic conditions," they began to murmur. "The inevitable laws of
supply and--"

"Get out of my garden!" Miss Abigail raged at them. "Get out!"

They had scuttled before her, laughing at her quaint verocity, and she had
sworn wrath fully never to let another city dweller inside her gate--a
resolution which she was forced to forego as time passed on and she became
more and more hard pressed for ammunition.

Up to this time she had lived in perfect satisfaction on seven hundred
dollars a year, but now she began to feel straitened. She no longer dared
afford even the tiniest expenditure for her garden. She spaded the beds
herself, drew leaf mold from the woods in repeated trips with a child's
express wagon, and cut the poles for her sweet-peas with her own hands.
When Miss Molly Leonard declared herself on the verge of starvation from
lack of sewing to do, and threatened to move to Johnsonville to be near
her sister Annie, Miss Abigail gave up her "help" and paid Miss Molly for
the time spent in the empty reading-room of the library. But the campaign
soon called for more than economy, even the most rigid. When the minister
had a call elsewhere, and the trustees of the church seized the
opportunity to declare it impossible to appoint his successor, Miss
Abigail sold her woodlot and arranged through the Home Missionary Board
for someone to hold services at least once a fortnight. Later the "big
meadow" so long coveted by a New York family as a building site was
sacrificed to fill the empty war chest, and, temporarily in funds, she
hired a boy to drive her about the country drumming up a congregation.

Christmas time was the hardest for her. The traditions of old Greenford
were for much decorating of the church with ropes of hemlock, and a huge
Christmas tree in the Town Hall with presents for the best of the
Sunday-school scholars. Winding the ropes had been, of old, work for the
young unmarried people, laughing and flirting cheerfully. By the promise
of a hot supper, which she furnished herself, Miss Abigail succeeded in
getting a few stragglers from the back hil