oses painted on the back. "I was told to
see you about these. They're only four dollars a dozen, and the smallest
school children love 'em." Miss Abigail straightened herself with
difficulty. She had been weeding the gladiolus bed. "Four dollars," she
mused, "I was going to put four dollars into rose-bushes this fall." She
put out a strong, earth-stained old hand and took the chair. Her affection
for her native Greenford began to rise through her life-long thrift, a
mental ferment not unusual with her. Finally, "All right," she said; "send
'em to the schoolhouse, and say they're in memory of all my grandfathers
and grandmothers that learned their letters in that schoolhouse."

She went back to her digging and the agent clicked the gate back of his
retreat. Suddenly she stood up without remembering to ease her back. She
heard the first shot from the enemy who was to advance so rapidly upon her
thereafter. "Wait a minute," she called to the agent. As he paused, she
made a swift calculation. "I don't believe I want a dozen," she said, much
surprised. "I can't think of that many little ones." The agent took his
notebook. "How many?" he asked.

The ponderous old woman stared at him absently, while she made a mental
canvass of the town. She spoke with a gasp. "We don't need any!" she
cried. "There ain't a child in school under eleven."

"Take some now and have them handy," urged the agent.

Miss Abigail's gaze again narrowed in silent calculation. When she spoke
her exclamation was not for her listener. She had forgotten him. "Good
Lord of Love!" she cried. "There ain't a single one comin' up to sit on
those chairs if I should buy 'em!"

The agent was utterly blotted from her mind. She did not know when he left
her garden. She only knew that there were no children in Greenford. There
were no children in her town! "Why, what's comin' to Greenford!" she
cried.

And yet, even as she cried out, she was aware that she had had a warning,
definite, ominous, a few days before, from the lips of Molly Leonard. At
that time she had put away her startled uneasiness with a masterful hand,
burying it resolutely where she had laid away all the other emotions of
her life, under the brown loam of her garden. But it all came back to her
now.

Her thin, fluttering, little old friend had begun with tragic emphasis,
"The roof to the library leaks!"

Miss Abigail had laughed as usual at Molly's habit of taking small events
with bated brea