IV
It was Saturday afternoon, the 24th 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.
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