painfully ingenious
dodging behind the low counters as though she had a cloven foot to
hide. When evening came, she could have sat down--if she had been
any other plagued woman in the world but Sally Wimple--and had a
good cry. It was bitter weather, and she had shivered much;--she did
not mind that; but to look poverty-stricken! No, she did not cry
_outside_, but it was a narrow escape. In her trouble, her eyes
wandered around the shop beseechingly; and lo! she beheld in the
window a timely hooped skirt,--a daring speculation wherein she had
lately invested, in consideration of the growing importance of her
millinery department; and straightway Miss Wimple went and took the
hoop, and offered it up for a pride-offering in the stead of her
delicacy, that was so dear to her. It was a thing of touching
artlessness to do; only so cunning-simple a soul as Sally Wimple
could ever have thought of it. She sat up late that night, engaged
in compromising with her prejudices, by drawing out the whalebones,
one by one, from the "Alboni," shaving them down with a piece of
glass, very thin, and tucking them,--until all their loud defiance
was subdued, and for Miss Wimple's Hoop it might be tenderly
deprecated that it was nothing to speak of, "such a _leetle_ one."

The sacrifice was made, and, let us hope, not merely figuratively
accepted by Him to whom _prejudices_ may arise today an offering
not less honored than was the blood of rams in the hour when Abraham
laid his first-born on an altar in the thicket of Jehovah-jireh.

If any challenge the probabilities of this incident, and cavil at
the chance that Miss Wimple's necessity could, under any
circumstances, bring forth such an invention, I hope I have only to
remind them that that brave angel had become straitened to a point
whereat she had neither material from which to erect another quilted
petticoat, nor the means of procuring it, even if she could spare the
time necessary to the making of one,--which she could not, being now
closely occupied between the engagements of her hired needle and the
newly-found cares that Charity had imposed upon her.

But, however the probabilities may appear, Miss Wimple's Hoop was a
shaved-whalebone fact; and the quilted petticoat would never have
been missed, but for the officious scrutiny of the eyes, and the
provoking prating of the tongues, of a sophisticated few who
marvelled greatly at the pliancy and the "perfect set" of Miss Wimple's