y
would be packed into huge boxes and shipped to the city hospitals to
gladden pain-racked bodies and weary hearts.

Nanny Ainslee was still outside waiting for Grandma Wentworth. Lilac
Sunday Nanny always waited for Grandma and always sat with her, because
of a certain story that Grandma had told her once when the lamps were
not yet lit and the soft summer moonlight lay in windowed squares on
Grandma's sitting room floor. Nanny began to inquire of the last
comers. But Tommy and Alice Winston, still bridey and shy, said they
had seen nothing of her, and even Roger Allan supposed of course that
she must be in her favorite pew, known to the oldtimers as Inspiration
Corner. For it had been observed that all ministers sooner or later
delivered their discourses to Grandma Wentworth. They were always sure
of her undivided attention. Other people's eyes and minds might
wander, some might be even openly bored, but Grandma's uplifted face
was always kindly and encouraging, even though the sermon was
hopelessly jumbled. She was the surest, severest critic and yet each
man preached to her feeling that with the criticism would come
kindliness and the sort of mother comfort that Grandma somehow knew how
to give to the meanest and most blundering of creatures. Indeed, it
was the least successful of Green Valley's ministers who had designated
Grandma's seat as Inspiration Corner. And then had in a final burst of
wrath told Green Valley that like Sodom and Gomorrah it was doomed,
that no mere man preacher could save it, that its only hope lay in
Grandma Wentworth, who alone understood its miserable, petty orneriness.

He meant to leave town a sputtering, raging man, that minister,--full
of what he called righteous wrath. But he went to say good-by to
Grandma and experienced a change of heart.

He began his farewell by unburdening his heart and soul of all the
ponderous doctrines that sunny, joyful Green Valley had refused to
listen to. He spoke earnestly of the world's terrible need of
salvation, the fearful necessity for haste and wholesale repentance and
the awful menace of God's wrath. And the fact that he was a man
entering his forties instead of his thirties made matters worse.

But Grandma listened patiently and when he was emptied of all his
sorrows and worriments she took him out into her herb-garden, seated
him where he could see the sunset hills and then she preached a
marvellous sermon to just this one man al