ys,
with her white ostrich feather turning gray and her eyes smarting and
watering, for the rest of her natural life.

Whereupon, this being in a business session, she then and there proposed
to her already hypnotized constituents ways of earning enough money to
build a new chimney on the other side of the church.

An awe-stricken community witnessed this beneficent act of vandalism,
and, finding that no thunderbolts of retribution descended from
the skies, greatly relished the change. If one or two aged persons
complained that they could not sleep as sweetly during sermon-time in
the now clear atmosphere of the church, and that the parson's eye
was keener than before, why, that was a mere detail, and could not
be avoided; what was the loss of a little sleep compared with the
discoloration of Mrs. Jere Burbank's white ostrich feather and the
smarting of Mrs. Jere Burbank's eyes?

A new furnace followed the new chimney, in due course, and as a sense of
comfort grew, there was opportunity to notice the lack of beauty.
Twice in sixty years had some well-to-do summer parishioner painted the
interior of the church at his own expense; but although the roof had
been many times reshingled, it had always persisted in leaking, so that
the ceiling and walls were disfigured by unsightly spots and stains and
streaks. The question of shingling was tacitly felt to be outside the
feminine domain, but as there were five women to one man in the church
membership, the feminine domain was frequently obliged to extend its
limits into the hitherto unknown. Matters of tarring and waterproofing
were discussed in and out of season, and the very school-children
imbibed knowledge concerning lapping, over-lapping, and cross-lapping,
and first and second quality of cedar shingles. Miss Lobelia Brewster,
who had a rooted distrust of anything done by mere man, created strife
by remarking that she could have stopped the leak in the belfry tower
with her red flannel petticoat better than the Milltown man with his
new-fangled rubber sheeting, and that the last shingling could have been
more thoroughly done by a "female infant babe"; whereupon the person
criticized retorted that he wished Miss Lobelia Brewster had a few
infant babes to "put on the job he'd like to see 'em try." Meantime
several male members of the congregation, who at one time or another had
sat on the roof during the hottest of the dog-days to see that shingling
operations were consc