eant the town itself. Without them there would
have been no village at all. Boys and girls, men and women toiled year
in and year out in the factories as their fathers and mothers, often
their grandfathers and grandmothers had done before them. If you were
not connected with Davis and Coulter's you were not of Baileyville's
aristocracy.

Hence it followed that the prospective marriage of Mr. John Coulter
could not but be an event concerning which the entire community
gossiped with eager and kindly interest. The lady was from New York,
people said, and Mr. John had met her while doing war work in France.
Both of them had large fortunes. But the fact that appealed to the
villagers far more than this was the intelligence that the wedding was
to take place at the old Coulter homestead and be followed by a fete to
which all the mill people and their families were to be invited. How
exciting that was! And how exultant were those whose connection with
the mills insured them a card to this mammoth festivity!

Rumor whispered there were to be gigantic tents with games and dancing;
bands of music; fireworks; and every imaginable dainty to eat. Some
even went so far as to assert there would be boats on the miniature
lake and a Punch and Judy show. Oh, it was to be a fete indeed!

For weeks the town talked of nothing else; and as Carl McGregor
listened to these stories his regrets at not being numbered among Davis
and Coulter's elect waxed keener and keener. One did not enjoy being
left out of a function of such magnitude, a party to which everybody
else was going. Not only did it make you feel lonely and stranded but
it mortified you to be obliged to own you were not of the happy band
included in so magnificent a celebration.

"Now if you'd only have let me take a job at the mills as I wanted to,
Ma, we might have been going to Mr. Coulter's party along with the rest
of the world," Carl bemoaned. "I always told you I ought to go into
those mills the way the other fellows do. But you wouldn't hear to it.
Now see what's come of it. We are left high and dry. I'll bet we are
the only people in Baileyville who are not invited to that party.
Everybody is to be there. If even one member of a family works at the
mill that lets in the bunch."

"Like the garden parties great families used to give their tenants in
the old country," Mrs. McGregor murmured reminiscently.

"I don't know about the old country," replied Carl ungraciously, "