oor eyes. Don't let Elder Gray see you
crying, or he'll think I've been naughty. He's just going in downstairs
to see Eldress Abby. Was it wrong what I said about backsliding, or
what, Mardie? We'll help each udder climb, an' then we'll go home an'
help poor lonesome Fardie; shall we?"

"Abby!" called Elder Gray, stepping into the entry of the Office
Building.

"Yee, I'm coming," Eldress Abby answered from the stairway. "Go right
out and sit down on the bench by the door, where I can catch a few
minutes' more light for my darning; the days seem to be growing
short all to once. Did Lemuel have a good sale of basket-work at the
mountains? Rosetta has n't done so well for years at Old Orchard. We
seem to be prospering in every material direction, Daniel, but my
heart is heavy somehow, and I have to be instant in prayer to keep from
discouragement."

"It has n't been an altogether good year with us spiritually," confessed
Daniel; "perhaps we needed chastening."

"If we needed it, we've received it," Abby ejaculated, as she pushed her
darning-ball into the foot of a stocking. "Nothing has happened since I
came here thirty years ago that has troubled me like the running away of
Nathan and Hetty. If they had been new converts, we should have thought
the good seed had n't got fairly rooted, but those children were brought
to us when Nathan was eleven and Hetty nine."

"I well remember, for the boy's father and the girl's mother came on
the same train; a most unusual occurrence to receive two children in one
day."

"I have cause to remember Hetty in her first month, for she was as wild
as a young hawk. She laughed in meeting the first Sunclay, and when she
came back, I told her to sit behind me in silence for half an hour while
I was reading my Bible. 'Be still now, Hetty, and labor to repent,' I
said. When the time was up, she said in a meek little mite of a
voice, 'I think I'm least in the Kingdom now, Eldress Abby!' 'Then run
outdoors,' I said. She kicked up her heels like a colt and was through
the door in a second. Not long afterwards I put my hands behind me to
tie my apron tighter, and if that child had n't taken my small scissors
lying on the table and cut buttonholes all up and down my strings,
hundreds of them, while she was 'laboring to repent.'"

Elder Gray smiled reminiscently, though he had often heard the story
before. "Neither of the children came from godly families," he said,
"but at least the parent