It was Saturday afternoon, the twenty-fourth of December, and the weary sisters of the Dorcas band rose from their bruised knees and removed their little stores of carpet-tacks from their mouths.
This was a feminine custom of long standing, and as no village dressmaker had ever died of pins in the digestive organs, so were no symptoms of carpet-tacks ever discovered in any Dorcas, living or dead.Men wondered at the habit and reviled it, but stood confounded in the presence of its indubitable harmlessness.
The red ingrain carpet was indeed very warm, beautiful, and comforting to the eye, and the sisters were suitably grateful to Providence, and devoutly thankful to themselves, that they had been enabled to buy, sew, and lay so many yards of it.But as they stood looking at their completed task, it was cruelly true that there was much left to do.
The aisles had been painted dark brown on each side of the red strips leading from the doors to the pulpit, but the rest of the church floor was "a thing of shreds and patches." Each member of the carpet committee had paid (as a matter of pride, however ill she could afford it) three dollars and sixty-seven cents for sufficient carpet to lay in her own pew; but these brilliant spots of conscientious effort only made the stretches of bare, unpainted floor more evident.And that was not all.Traces of former spasmodic and individual efforts desecrated the present ideals.
The doctor's pew had a pink and blue Brussels on it; the lawyer's, striped stair-carpeting; the Browns from Deerwander sported straw matting and were not abashed; while the Greens, the Whites, the Blacks and the Greys displayed floor coverings as dissimilar as their names.
"I never noticed it before!" exclaimed Maria Sharp, "but it ain't Christian, that floor! it's heathenish and ungodly!""For mercy's sake, don't swear, Maria," said Mrs.Miller nervously.
"We've done our best, and let's hope that folks will look up and not down.It isn't as if they were going to set in the chandelier;they'll have something else to think about when Nancy gets her hemlock branches and white carnations in the pulpit vases.This morning my Abner picked off two pinks from the plant I've been nursing in my dining-room for weeks, trying to make it bloom for Christmas.I slapped his hands good, and it's been haunting me ever since to think I had to correct him the day before Christmas--Come, Lobelia, we must be hurrying!"
"One thing comforts me," exclaimed the Widow Buzzell, as she took her hammer and tacks preparatory to leaving; "and that is that the Methodist meetin'-house ain't got any carpet at all.""Mrs.Buzzell, Mrs.Buzzell!" interrupted the minister's wife, with a smile that took the sting from her speech."It will be like punishing little Abner Miller; if we think those thoughts on Christmas Eve, we shall surely be haunted afterward.""And anyway," interjected Maria Sharp, who always saved the situation, "you just wait and see if the Methodists don't say they'd rather have no carpet at all than have one that don't go all over the floor.I know 'em!" and she put on her hood and blanket-shawl as she gave one last fond look at the improvements.
"I'm going home to get my supper, and come back afterward to lay the carpet in my pew; my beans and brown bread will be just right by now, and perhaps it will rest me a little; besides, I must feed 'Zekiel."As Nancy Wentworth spoke, she sat in a corner of her own modest rear seat, looking a little pale and tired.Her waving dark hair had loosened and fallen over her cheeks, and her eyes gleamed from under it wistfully.Nowadays Nancy's eyes never had the sparkle of gazing into the future, but always the liquid softness that comes from looking backward.
"The church will be real cold by then, Nancy," objected Mrs.
Burbank.--"Good-night, Mrs.Baxter."