“He was buried outside the grave-yard, at the top of the hill, as near as might be to the granite head-stone that recorded the virtues of ’Ye most faithful Servant and Man of God Silus Timothy Lorrimer Who for 52 Yrs did Minister to This Ch and Congregation in Spiritual Things.

    ’The faithful Memory of The Just
    Shall Flourish When they turn To Dust.’

“Peter has no head-stone to mark his grave, but his memory is green in Hilltown.  The old folks love to tell of his beauty, his intelligence, and his life-long devotion to his master; and there is a tradition handed down and repeated half-seriously, half in jest, that when Gabriel blows his trumpet on the resurrection morning, and the dead in Hilltown grave-yard awake, Parson Lorrimer will lead his flock to the judgment riding on a white horse.”

CHAPTER XI.

THE QUILTING.

The patchwork quilt was finished.  The pieces of calico Miss Ruth from week to week had measured and cut and basted together, with due regard to contrast and harmony of colors, were transformed into piles of gay-colored blocks; the blocks multiplied and extended themselves into strips, and the strips basted together had kept sixteen little hands “sewing the long seam” for three Wednesday afternoons.  And now it was finished, and the quilting had begun.

Miss Ruth had decided, after a consultation with the minister’s wife, that the girls might do this most important and difficult part of the business.  She wanted the gift to be theirs from beginning to end—­that, having furnished all the material, they should do all the work.  How pleased and proud they were to be thus trusted, you can imagine, while the satisfaction they took in the result of the summer’s labor repaid their leader a hundred-fold for her share in the enterprise.

Never was a quilt so admired and praised.  Of all the odds and ends the girls had brought in, Ruth Elliot had rejected nothing, not even the polka-dotted orange print in which Mrs. Jones delighted to array her baby or the gorgeous green-and-red gingham of Nellie Dimock’s new apron.

It took two long afternoons of close work for the girls (not one of whom had ever quilted before) to accomplish this task; but they did it bravely and cheerfully.  There were pricked fingers and tired arms and cramped feet, and the big dictionary that raised Nellie Dimock to a level with her taller companions must have proved any thing but an easy seat; but no one complained.

Let us look in upon the Patchwork Quilt Society toward the close of this last afternoon.

“I was sewing on this very block,” Mollie Elliot is saying, leaning back in her chair to survey her work, “when Aunt Ruth was telling us how Captain Bobtail’s Brownie brought Tufty home.

“That pink-and-gray block over there in the corner,” said Fannie Eldridge, pointing with her needle, “was the first one I sewed on.  I made awful work with it, too; for when Dinah Diamond set herself on fire with the kerosene lamp I forgot what I was about, and took ever so many long puckery stitches that had to be picked out,”