er chair and washed the
pitcher until the glass shone. Sitting down again, she glanced at the
little window. It would never do; she had forgotten how dusty and
blurred it was, and she took her cloth and burnished the panes. Then she
scoured the table, then the floor, then blackened the stove before she
sat down to her knitting. And of course the lily had done it all, just
by showing, in its whiteness, how grimy everything else was."

The minister's wife who had been in Edgewood only a few months, looked
admiringly at Nancy's bright face, wondering that five-and-thirty years
of life, including ten of school-teaching, had done so little to mar its
serenity. "The lily story is as true as the gospel!" she exclaimed, "and
I can see how one thing has led you to another in making the church
comfortable. But my husband says that two coats of paint on the pews
would cost a considerable sum."

"How about cleaning them? I don't believe they've had a good hard
washing since the flood." The suggestion came from Deacon Miller's wife
to the president.

"They can't even be scrubbed for less than fifteen or twenty dollars, for
I thought of that and asked Mrs. Simpson yesterday, and she said twenty
cents a pew was the cheapest she could do it for."

"We've done everything else," said Nancy Wentworth, with a twitch of her
thread; "why don't we scrub the pews? There's nothing in the orthodox
creed to forbid, is there?"

"Speakin' o' creeds," and here old Mrs. Sargent paused in her work,
"Elder Ransom from Acreville stopped with us last night, an' he tells me
they recite the Euthanasian Creed every few Sundays in the Episcopal
Church. I didn't want him to know how ignorant I was, but I looked up
the word in the dictionary. It means easy death, and I can't see any
sense in that, though it's a terrible long creed, the Elder says, an' if
it's any longer 'n ourn, I should think anybody _might_ easy die learnin'
it!"

"I think the word is Athanasian," ventured the minister's wife.

"Elder Ransom's always plumb full o' doctrine," asserted Miss Brewster,
pursuing the subject. "For my part, I'm glad he preferred Acreville to
our place. He was so busy bein' a minister, he never got round to bein'
a human creeter. When he used to come to sociables and picnics, always
lookin' kind o' like the potato blight, I used to think how complete he'd
be if he had a foldin' pulpit under his coat tails; they make foldin'
beds nowadays, an' I