on could have advanced the seventy-five dollars necessary to
keep the rain from trickling through the roof and leaking in a steady
stream upon the pew of Mrs. Bumpkin, a lady too useful in knitting
sweaters for the heathen in South Africa to be ignored. But in that year
of grace, 1897, there had been so many demands made upon everybody, from
the Saint William's Hospital for Trolley Victims, from the Mistletoe
Inn, a club for workingmen which was in its initial stages and most
worthily appealed to the public purse, and for the University Extension
Society, whose ten-cent lectures were attended by the swellest people in
Dumfries Corners and their daughters--and so on--that the collections of
Saint George's had necessarily fallen off to such an extent that
plumbers' bills were almost as much of a burden to the rector as the
needs of missionaries in Borneo for dress-suits and golf-clubs. In this
emergency, Mr. Peters, whose account at his bank had been overdrawn by
his check which had paid for painting the Sunday-school room pink in
order that the young religious idea might be taught to shoot under more
roseate circumstances than the blue walls would permit, and so could not
well offer to have the roof repaired at his own expense, suggested a
book sale.

"We can get a lot of books on sale from publishers," he said, "and I
haven't any doubt that Mrs. Peters will be glad to have the affair at
our house. We can surely raise seventy-five dollars in this way.
Besides, it will draw the ladies in the congregation together."

The offer was accepted. Mrs. Peters acquiesced. Peters and his
co-workers asked favors and got them from friends in the publishing
world. The day came. The books arrived, and the net results to the
Roofing Fund of Saint George's were gratifying. The vestry had asked for
seventy-five dollars, and the sale actually cleared eighty-three! To be
sure, Mr. Wiggins spent fifty dollars at the sale. And Mrs. Thompson
spent forty-nine. And the cake-table took in thirty-eight. And the
ice-cream was sold, thanks to the voracity of the children, for nineteen
dollars. And some pictures which had been donated by Mrs. Bumpkin sold
for thirty-one dollars, and the gambling cakes, with rings and gold
dollars in them, cleared fifteen. Still, when it was all reckoned up,
eighty-three dollars stood to the credit of the roof! In affairs of this
kind, results, not expenses, are considered.

Surely the venture was a success. Althoug