at must be rushed.

"Want to help?" Judith had asked, and soon deft old fingers were vying
with young ones.

"Why, Cousin Ann, you have regular fairy fingers," said Judith, and
the old lady had blushed with delight. They worked until the task was
completed, while Mrs. Buck nodded over "Holy Living and Dying."

In the morning, when Judith made her early way to the kitchen, she
found a fire burning briskly in the stove, the kettle ready to boil
and the wood box filled. Uncle Billy, smiling happily, was seated in
the doorway. Judith thanked him heartily and he assured her he liked
to help white ladies, but didn't hold much to helping his own race.

"They's ongrateful an' proudified an' the mo' you holps 'em the mo'
they shifts. Me'n Miss Ann has been visitin so long we ain't entered
much inter housekeepin', but somehow we seem so sot an' statiumnary
now that it comes nachul ter both er us ter len' a han'."

"That's nice," laughed Judith. "I do hope you and Cousin Ann and Cupid
and Puck will all feel at home. I wish you would keep your eye open
for a nice, respectable woman who could help me, now that I have so
many dinners to serve to the trolley men."

"I sho' will--an', Miss Judy, I'm wonderin' if you ain't got a little
bitser blue cloth what I mought patch my pants with. If my coattails
wa'n't so long I wouldn't be fitten ter go 'mongst folks."

After some discussion with her mother, in which the girl tried to make
Mrs. Buck see the difference between saving and hoarding, Judith
finally produced for old Billy many leftovers of maternal and paternal
grandfathers.

"Mumsy, you are a trump. Now, you see you saved these things so
someone deserving could use them, but if they had stayed in the attic
until the moths had eaten them up while old Billy went ragged then
that would have been wasteful hoarding."

"I'm not minding so much about your Grandfather Buck's things, but
somehow it seems a desecration for that old darkey to be wearing your
Grandfather Knight's trousers."

"That's what makes me say you are a trump, Mumsy. I know you look upon
those broadcloth pants as a kind of sacred trust, and I just love you
to death for giving in about them."

"And my father was tall and straight of limb, too," wailed Mrs. Buck.
"It seems worse because old Billy's legs are so short and crooked."

Crooked they may have been, but short they were not. By the time the
broadcloth trousers traveled the circuitous route of the old