um grew to six
hundred dollars.

Then the ladies held a mass-meeting in the damp, ill-smelling vestry.
The result was a series of entertainments varying from a strawberry
festival to the "passion play" illustrated. The entertainers were
indefatigable. They fed their guests with baked beans and "red
flannel" hash, and acted charades from the Bible. They held
innumerable guessing contests, where one might surmise as to the
identity of a baby's photograph or conjecture as to the cook of a mince
pie. These heroic efforts brought the fund up to eight hundred
dollars. Two hundred yet to be found--and it was November!

With anxious faces and puckered brows, the ladies held another meeting
in that cheerless vestry--then hastened home with new courage and a new
plan.

Bits of silk and tissue-paper, gay-colored worsteds and knots of ribbon
appeared as by magic in every cottage. Weary fingers fashioned
impossible fancy articles of no earthly use to any one, and tired
housewives sat up till midnight dressing dolls in flimsy muslin. The
church was going to hold a fair! Everything and everybody succumbed
graciously or ungraciously to the inevitable. The prayer-meetings were
neglected, the missionary meetings postponed, the children went ragged
to school, and the men sewed on their own buttons. In time, however,
the men had to forego even that luxury, and were obliged to remain
buttonless, for they themselves were dragged into the dizzy whirl and
set to making patchwork squares.

The culminating feature of the fair was to be a silk crazy quilt, and
in an evil moment Miss Wiggins, a spinster of uncertain age, had
suggested that it would be "perfectly lovely" to have the gentlemen
contribute a square each. The result would have made the craziest
inmate of a lunatic asylum green with envy. The square made by old
Deacon White, composed of pieces of blue, green, scarlet, and purple
silk fastened together as one would sew the leather on a baseball, came
next to the dainty square of the town milliner's covered with
embroidered butterflies and startling cupids. Nor were the others
found wanting in variety. It was indeed a wonderful quilt.

The fair and a blizzard began simultaneously the first day of December.
The one lasted a week, and the other three days. The people
conscientiously ploughed through the snow, attended the fair, and
bought recklessly. The children made themselves sick with rich
candies, and Deacon Whit