all her delicate
stitches.

On a long-looked-for afternoon in August the minister's wife drove up
to the brick house door, and handed out the great piece of bunting to
Rebecca, who received it in her arms with as much solemnity as if it had
been a child awaiting baptismal rites.

"I'm so glad!" she sighed happily. "I thought it would never come my
turn!"

"You should have had it a week ago, but Huldah Meserve upset the ink
bottle over her star, and we had to baste on another one. You are the
last, though, and then we shall sew the stars and stripes together, and
Seth Strout will get the top ready for hanging. Just think, it won't
be many days before you children will be pulling the rope with all your
strength, the band will be playing, the men will be cheering, and the
new flag will go higher and higher, till the red, white, and blue shows
against the sky!"

Rebecca's eyes fairly blazed. "Shall I fell on' my star, or buttonhole
it?" she asked.

"Look at all the others and make the most beautiful stitches you can,
that's all. It is your star, you know, and you can even imagine it is
your state, and try and have it the best of all. If everybody else
is trying to do the same thing with her state, that will make a great
country, won't it?"

Rebecca's eyes spoke glad confirmation of the idea. "My star, my state!"
she repeated joyously. "Oh, Mrs. Baxter, I'll make such fine stitches
you'll think the white grew out of the blue!"

The new minister's wife looked pleased to see her spark kindle a flame
in the young heart. "You can sew so much of yourself into your star,"
she went on in the glad voice that made her so winsome, "that when you
are an old lady you can put on your specs and find it among all the
others. Good-by! Come up to the parsonage Saturday afternoon; Mr. Baxter
wants to see you."

"Judson, help that dear little genius of a Rebecca all you can!" she
said that night, when they were cosily talking in their parlor and
living "all over" the parish carpet. "I don't know what she may, or may
not, come to, some day; I only wish she were ours! If you could have
seen her clasp the flag tight in her arms and put her cheek against it,
and watched the tears of feeling start in her eyes when I told her
that her star was her state! I kept whispering to myself, Covet not thy
neighbor's child!'"

Daily at four o'clock Rebecca scrubbed her hands almost to the bone,
brushed her hair, and otherwise prepared herself in