n, and sing well,
Mr. Scribner," Janice said to the Sunday-school superintendent, "when
there isn't an octave in harmony on the old piano? Come on! let's see
what we can do about getting a brand-new, first-class instrument?"

"Oh, my dear girl! Impossible! quite impossible!" declared the
superintendent, who was a bald, hopeless little man, who kept books for
the biggest store in town, and was imbued with the prevailing Poketown
spirit of "letting well enough alone."

"How do you know it is impossible till you try?" demanded the girl,
laughing. "How much would you give, yourself, toward a new instrument?"

Mr. Scribner winked hard, swallowed, and burst out with: "Ten dollars!
Yes, ma'am! I'd go without a new winter overcoat for the sake of
having a decent piano."

"That's a beginning," Janice said, gravely, seizing paper and pad.
"And I can spare five. Now, don't you see, if we can interest
everybody else in town proportionately, we'd have enough to buy _two_
pianos, let alone one.

"But let us start the subscription papers with our own offerings. You
take one, and I'll take the other. You can ask everybody who comes
into the store, and I'll go out into the highways and hedges and see
what I can gather."

Janice interested the young people's society in the project, too; and
her own enthusiasm, plus that of the other young folks, brought the
thing about. At the usual Sunday-school entertainment on Christmas
night the new piano was used for the first time, and Mrs. Ebbie
Stewart, who played it, fairly cried into her score book, she was so
glad.

"I was so sick of pounding on that old tin-panny thing!" she sobbed.
"A real piano seems too good to be true."

The old Town Hall standing at the head of High Street--just where the
street forked to become two country highways--had a fine stick of
spruce in front of it for a flagpole; but on holidays the flag that was
raised (if the janitor didn't forget it) was tattered like a
battle-banner, and, in addition, was of the vintage of a score of years
before. Our flag has changed some during the last two decades as to
the number of stars and their arrangement on the azure field.

Of a sudden people began to notice the need of a new flag. Who
mentioned it first? Why, that Day girl!

And she kept right on mentioning it until some people began to see that
it was really a disgrace to Poketown--and almost an insult to the flag
itself--to raise such a tattered banner