e figure in her white
night-gown, stood in the door.

"Well, what is it?" her grandmother said, in a severe voice that had a
kindly inflection in it.

"Grandma--"

"What is it?"

"I lost my patchwork on purpose. I didn't want--to sew it."

"Lost your patchwork on purpose!"

"Yes--ma'am," sobbed Ann Lizy.

"Let it drop out of the bag on purpose?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well, you did a dreadful wicked thing then. Go right back to bed."

Ann Lizy went back to bed and to sleep. Remorse no longer gnawed keenly
enough at her clear, childish conscience to keep her awake, now her sin
was confessed. She said her prayers and went to sleep. Although the next
morning the reckoning came, the very worst punishment was over for her.
Her grandmother held the judicious use of the rod to be a part of her
duty towards her beloved little orphan granddaughter, so she switched
Ann Lizy with a little rod of birch, and sent her forth full of salutary
tinglings to search for the bead bag and the patchwork. All the next
week Ann Lizy searched the fields and road for the missing articles,
when she was not cutting calico patchwork by a thread and sewing over
and over. It seemed to her that life was made up of those two
occupations, but at the end of a week the search, so far as the bead bag
was concerned, came to an end.

On Saturday afternoon the parson's wife called on old Mrs. Jennings. The
sweet, gentle young lady in her black silk dress, her pink cheeks, and
smooth waves of golden hair gleaming through her worked lace veil
entered the north room, which was the parlor, and sat down in the
rocking-chair. Ann Lizy and her grandmother sat opposite, and they both
noticed at the same moment that the parson's wife held in her hand--_the
bead bag_!

Ann Lizy gave a little involuntary "oh;" her grandmother shook her head
fiercely at her, and the parson's wife noticed nothing. She went on
talking about the pinks out in the yard, in her lovely low voice.

As soon as she could, old Mrs. Jennings excused herself and beckoned Ann
Lizy to follow her out of the room. Then, while she was arranging a
square of pound-cake and a little glass of elderberry wine on a tray,
she charged Ann Lizy to say nothing about the bead bag to the parson's
wife. "Mind you act as if you didn't see it," said she; "don't sit there
lookin' at it that way."

"But it's your bead bag, grandma," said Ann Lizy, in a bewildered way.

"Don't you say anything," admonished her