When the time came to hand in our collections for
the library fund Peter had the largest—three
dollars. Felicity was a good second with two
and a half. This was simply because the hens
had laid so well.
“If you’d had to pay father for all the
extra handfuls of wheat you’ve fed to those
hens, Miss Felicity, you wouldn’t have so much,”
said Dan spitefully.
“I didn’t,” said Felicity indignantly.
“Look how Aunt Olivia’s hens laid, too,
and she fed them herself just the same as usual.”
“Never mind,” said Cecily, “we have
all got something to give. If you were like poor
Sara Ray, and hadn’t been able to collect anything,
you might feel bad.”
But Sara Ray had something to give. She
came up the hill after tea, all radiant. When
Sara Ray smiled—and she did not waste her
smiles—she was rather pretty in a plaintive,
apologetic way. A dimple or two came into sight,
and she had very nice teeth—small and white,
like the traditional row of pearls.
“Oh, just look,” she said. “Here
are three dollars—and I’m going to
give it all to the library fund. I had a letter
to-day from Uncle Arthur in Winnipeg, and he sent
me three dollars. He said I was to use it any
way I liked, so ma couldn’t refuse to let me
give it to the fund. She thinks it’s an
awful waste, but she always goes by what Uncle Arthur
says. Oh, I’ve prayed so hard that some
money might come some way, and now it has. See
what praying does!”
I was very much afraid that we did not rejoice quite
as unselfishly in Sara’s good fortune as we
should have done. We had earned our contributions
by the sweat of our brow, or by the scarcely less
disagreeable method of “begging.”
And Sara’s had as good as descended upon her
out of the skies, as much like a miracle as anything
you could imagine.
“She prayed for it, you know,” said Felix,
after Sara had gone home.
“That’s too easy a way of earning money,”
grumbled Peter resentfully. “If the rest
of us had just set down and done nothing, only prayed,
how much do you s’pose we’d have?
It don’t seem fair to me.”
“Oh, well, it’s different with Sara,”
said Dan. “We could earn money and
she couldn’t. You see? But come
on down to the orchard. The Story Girl had a
letter from her father to-day and she’s going
to read it to us.”
We went promptly. A letter from the Story Girl’s
father was always an event; and to hear her read it
was almost as good as hearing her tell a story.
Before coming to Carlisle, Uncle Blair Stanley had
been a mere name to us. Now he was a personality.
His letters to the Story Girl, the pictures and sketches
he sent her, her adoring and frequent mention of him,
all combined to make him very real to us.
