udied celebrated paintings of madonnas one winter and I made this
collection. Many of them are only penny prints and some are cut from
magazines--".

"They're perfectly good for us," Helen reassured her, and made another
note in her book.

Most of the visitors went home with the falling dark, but some stayed
to see the rose lanterns lighted, and others, who had not been able to
come in the afternoon, drove or walked out from town in the evening and
were served with ice cream and strawberries from a supply that had been
wonderfully well calculated.

"Let us have just a week to spend this money and to make up the sheets
and pillow cases and curtains and you can tell Mr. Watkins to send out
the women," Helen announced triumphantly to Delia.

"I'm going to spend the week with Margaret so I can come over with her
every day and help," returned smiling Delia.

"Then we shan't need a whole week. When you go home to-night please
ask your father to be making his selection--four mothers with two
children apiece. You and Tom can escort them out on the Tuesday after
Fourth of July."

CHAPTER VI

FURNITURE MAKING

It did not take the women long to adjust themselves to life at Rose
House, and as for the children, they loved it from the first. It was a
great international gathering that was sheltered on the old farm. Mrs.
Schuler was German; Moya, Irish. Mrs. Peterson, a Swede, occupied the
rooster room with her baby and her flaxen-haired daughter of three;
Mrs. Paterno, an Italian, found good pasturage among the cows of the
violet room for her black-eyed boys of two and four; Mrs. Tsanoff, a
Bulgarian, told the Matron that her twin girl babies were too young to
pay attention to the kittens on the curtains of the yellow room; while
Mrs. Vereshchagin, a Russian, discovered that the puppies of the blue
room were a great help to her in holding the attention of her boys of
three and five when she was putting them to bed.

Mrs. Schuler shook her head doubtfully when she took down their names
and nationalities in her notebook on the day of their arrival.

"If we get through the summer without quarrels over the war it will be
a miracle!" she exclaimed to her husband.

But she found that the poor creatures were too weary, too sad, too
physically crushed to have spirit enough left to fight any battles,
even those of words. With almost every one of them there had been a
tragedy such as often comes to the immigrants who