acs, and I'll
write a piece about it for the paper."

Martha smiled bravely, and Pearl was too polite to notice that her
eyes were suspiciously dewy.

"Oh, no, Pearl," she said, as she put away all the things carefully,
"I guess I'll never be married; but I love to make these things, and
when I'm sewing at them I often imagine things, foolish things
that'll never be; but I have them all ready, anyway"--she was closing
down her trunk lid--"I have them ready, anyway--in case--well, just
in case----".

CHAPTER XV

THE SOWING

"And other fell on good ground."

"EVERYTHING else is pretty only the old school," said Mary Watson.
"Look at the sky and the grass and the spruce trees on the
sandhills--all nice colours only the old school, and it's just a
grindy-gray-russet inside and out."

Mary was a plain-spoken young lady of ten.

"Well, we can clean it, anyway," Pearl said hopefully. "If we get it
clean it won't look so bad, even if it ain't pretty; and we can get
lots of violets, though they don't show much; but we'll know they're
there; and we can get cherry-blossoms and put them in something big
on the desk for the minister to look over, and they'll do him good,
for he'll see that somebody thought about it."

Maudie Steadman did not think much of the idea of violets and
cherry-blossoms. Maudie was fat, and had pale freekles all over her
face and on her hands. She talked in a jerky way, and was always out
of breath.

"Perhaps we could get Maw's tissue-paper flowers. She's got lovely
purple roses and yellow ones, and the like o' that," Maudie said.

Pearl considered it awhile.

"No, Maudie," she said. "Paper roses are fine in the winter, but in
the summer, if you use them, it looks as if you don't think much of
the kind that God's puttin' up, and you think you can do better
yourself. So I think with lots of meadow rue for the green stuff and
violets and blossoms, it'll be all right. Anyway, when the people get
in with their Sunday clothes on, and the flowers on their hats, it'll
take the bare look off it."

When Sunday came it seemed as if it were a day specially prepared for
the beginning of religious instruction in the Chicken Hill School.
The sky was cloudless save for little gauzy white flakes--"puffs of
chiffon that had blown off the angels' hats," Mary Watson said they
were. The grain was just high enough to run in waves before the wind,
and even Grandfather Gray, Mrs. Steadman's father, a