a year each.  Large families find their expenses reduced by three or four hundred dollars annually, aside from amounts saved on sewing-machines, pianos, organs, reapers, mowers, corn-shellers and a hundred other costly articles; all of which any member of any grange can obtain to-day at a saving of from twenty-five to forty per cent.  They are ordered in quantity from the manufacturers by the agents of the State granges of the West, and a single order even from a member of a new-formed grange in Vermont will be incorporated in the general State order.  The granges of the Eastern and Middle States are as yet mostly engaged in the work of organizing, and have not yet realized the pecuniary advantages accruing to older granges.  By this vast co-operative and entirely cash system all parties are well satisfied except certain unfortunate middlemen, who find their “occupation gone,” and themselves obliged to become producers or to enter into the sale of the numerous small and low-priced articles not yet affected by the movement.

MARIE ROWLAND.

[It is desirable that an organization which is assuming such proportions and promising such results should be examined from every point of view, and the foregoing article, written from that of an enthusiastic member of the order, will, we may hope, assist in throwing light upon the subject.  If there is some degree of vagueness in its statement of the aims and purposes with which the movement has been set on foot, it is probable that this exactly represents the state of mind of the great majority of those who are engaged in it.  The one tangible thing which it would seem to be accomplishing, a combination of the farmers for the purchase of pianos and agricultural implements at wholesale prices, is not of a very startling character; and if this can be attained at no greater cost or trouble to the individual “Patrons” than that of “decorating the granges” and taking part in the singing and the symbolical rites, a considerable advantage will no doubt have been gained.  How the cost of transportation is to be reduced, or why the railroads, by facilitating the exchange of productions, should have become the bete noire of the producers, are points on which more definite information would seem to be required.  But “the people” being now “aroused,” and the revolution in progress, we have only to await events in that hopeful state of mind which such announcements are calculated to inspire.—­ED.]

ON THE CHURCH STEPS.

CHAPTER VI.

I had a busy week of it in New York—­copying out instructions, taking notes of marriages and intermarriages in 1690, and writing each day a long, pleading letter to Bessie.  There was a double strain upon me:  all the arrangements for my client’s claims, and in an undercurrent the arguments to overcome Bessie’s decision, went on in my brain side by side.