io country for the lavish table she set.

"Short sweetening," she said in a thin high voice, "is dreadful high. I
said to Hiram yesterday that the last sugar loaf I bought was worth its
weight in silver. I should say, cut down on short sweetening. Long
sweetening is all right except for holidays."

Jason whispered to his mother, "What's long sweetening, mother?"

"They must mean molasses," she whispered in return, with a glance at
Jason's father, who sat at the far end of the pew reading his Bible as
he always did at this annual ordeal.

Jason looked from his mother's quiet, sensitive face, like yet so unlike
his own, to the bare pulpit of the little country church, then back at
Brother Ames, who was conducting the meeting. This annual conference and
the annual donation party were the black spots in Jason's year. His
mother, he suspected, suffered as he did: her face told him that. Her
tender lips, usually so wistful and eager, were at these times thin and
compressed. Her brown eyes, that except at times of death or illness
always held a remote twinkle, were inscrutable.

Jason's face was so like, yet already so unlike his mother's! The same
brown eyes, with the same twinkle, but tonight instead of being
inscrutable, boyishly hard. The same tender mouth, with tonight an
unboyish sardonic twist. What Jason's father's face might have said one
could not know, for it was hidden under a close-cropped brown beard. He
turned the leaves of his Bible composedly, looking up only as the
meeting reached a final triumphant conclusion with Brother Ames'
announcement:

"So, Brother Wilkins, there you are, a liberal allowance if I must say
it. Two hundred and fifty dollars for the year, with the usual donation
party to take place in the fall of the year."

Brother Wilkins, who was Jason's father, rose, bowed and said: "I thank
you, brethren. Let us pray!"

The fifty or sixty souls in the church knelt, and Jason's father, his
eyes closed, lifted his great bass voice in prayer:

"O God, You have led our feeble and trusting steps to this town of High
Hill, Ohio. You have put into the hearts and minds of these people, O
God, the purpose of feeding and clothing us. Whether they do it well or
ill, concerns them and You, O God, and not us. We are but Your humble
servants, doing Your divine bidding. Yet this is perhaps the proper
occasion, Our Heavenly Father, to thank You that You have sent us but
one child and that unlike Solomon,