ls, but the number grew steadily
smaller year by year. She and Miss Molly always trimmed the Christmas tree
themselves. Indeed, it soon became a struggle to pick out any child a
regular enough attendant at Sunday-school to be eligible for a present.
The time came when Miss Abigail found it difficult to secure any children
at all for the annual Christmas party.

The school authorities began to murmur at keeping up the large old
schoolhouse for a handful of pupils. Miss Abigail, at her wit's end,
guaranteed the fuel for warming the house, and half the pay of a teacher.
Examining, after this, her shrunk and meager resources, she discovered
she had promised far beyond her means. She was then seventy-three years
old, but an ageless valor sprang up in her to meet the new emergency. She
focused her acumen to the burning point and saw that the only way out of
her situation was to earn some money--an impossible thing at her age.
Without an instant's pause, "How shall I do it?" she asked herself, and
sat frowning into space for a long time.

When she rose up, the next development in her campaign was planned. Not in
vain had she listened scornfully to the silly talk of city folks about the
picturesqueness of her old house and garden. It was all grist to her mill,
she perceived, and during the next summer it was a grimly amused old
miller who watched the antics of Abigail Warner, arrayed in a
pseudo-oldfashioned gown of green-flowered muslin, with a quaintly ruffled
cap confining her rebellious white hair, talking the most correct
book-brand of down-east jargon, and selling flowers at twenty times their
value to automobile and carriage folk. She did not mind sacrificing her
personal dignity, but she did blush for her garden, reduced to the most
obvious commonplaces of flowers that any child could grow. But by
September she had saved the school-teacher's pay, and the Martins and the
Allens, who had been wavering on account of their children, decided to
stay another winter at least.

That was _something_, Miss Abigail thought, that Christmas, as she and
Miss Molly tortured their rheumatic limbs to play games with the six
children around the tree. She had held rigorously to the old tradition of
having the Christmas tree party in the Town Hall, and she had heartened
Miss Molly through the long lonely hours they had spent in trimming it;
but as the tiny handful of forlorn celebrants gathered about the tall
tree, glittering in all the