en years ago. You got a number of people to write each of
them three letters asking for ten cents from three each of their friends
and asking each of them to send on three similar letters. Three each
from three each, and three each more from each! Do you observe the
wonderful ingenuity of it? Nobody, I think, has forgotten how the
Willing Workers of the Church of England Church of Mariposa sat down
in the vestry room in the basement with a pile of stationery three
feet high, sending out the letters. Some, I know, will never forget it.
Certainly not Mr. Pupkin, the teller in the Exchange Bank, for it was
here that he met Zena Pepperleigh, the judge's daughter, for the
first time; and they worked so busily that they wrote out ever so many
letters--eight or nine--in a single afternoon, and they discovered
that their handwritings were awfully alike, which was one of the most
extraordinary and amazing coincidences, you will admit, in the history
of chirography.

But the scheme failed--failed utterly. I don't know why. The letters
went out and were copied broadcast and recopied, till you could see the
Mariposa endless chain winding its way towards the Rocky Mountains.
But they never got the ten cents. The Willing Workers wrote for it in
thousands, but by some odd chance they never struck the person who had
it.

Then after that there came a regular winter of effort. First of all they
had a bazaar that was got up by the Girls' Auxiliary and held in the
basement of the church. All the girls wore special costumes that were
brought up from the city, and they had booths, where there was every
imaginable thing for sale--pincushion covers, and chair covers, and sofa
covers, everything that you can think of. If the people had once started
buying them, the debt would have been lifted in no time. Even as it was
the bazaar only lost twenty dollars.

After that, I think, was the magic lantern lecture that Dean Drone gave
on "Italy and her Invaders." They got the lantern and the slides up from
the city, and it was simply splendid. Some of the slides were perhaps
a little confusing, but it was all there,--the pictures of the dense
Italian jungle and the crocodiles and the naked invaders with their
invading clubs. It was a pity that it was such a bad night, snowing
hard, and a curling match on, or they would have made a lot of money
out of the lecture. As it was the loss, apart from the breaking of the
lantern, which was unavoidable, was