The persuasive agent sought old Miss Abigail out among her flower-beds and held up to her a tiny chair with roses painted on the back. "I was told to see you about these. They're only four dollars a dozen, and the smallest school children love 'em." Miss Abigail straightened herself with difficulty. She had been weeding the gladiolus bed. "Four dollars," she mused, "I was going to put four dollars into rose-bushes this fall." She put out a strong, earth-stained old hand and took the chair. Her affection for her native Greenford began to rise through her life-long thrift, a mental ferment not unusual with her. Finally, "All right," she said; "send 'em to the schoolhouse, and say they're in memory of all my grandfathers and grandmothers that learned their letters in that schoolhouse."
She went back to her digging and the agent clicked the gate back of his retreat. Suddenly she stood up without remembering to ease her back. She heard the first shot from the enemy who was to advance so rapidly upon her thereafter. "Wait a minute," she called to the agent. As he paused, she made a swift calculation. "I don't believe I want a dozen," she said, much surprised. "I can't think of that many little ones." The agent took his notebook. "How many?" he asked.
The ponderous old woman stared at him absently, while she made a mental canvass of the town. She spoke with a gasp. "We don't need any!" she cried. "There ain't a child in school under eleven."
"Take some now and have them handy," urged the agent.
Miss Abigail's gaze again narrowed in silent calculation. When she spoke her exclamation was not for her listener. She had forgotten him. "Good Lord of Love!" she cried. "There ain't a single one comin' up to sit on those chairs if I should buy 'em!"
The agent was utterly blotted from her mind. She did not know when he left her garden. She only knew that there were no children in Greenford. There were no children in her town! "Why, what's comin' to Greenford!" she cried.
And yet, even as she cried out, she was aware that she had had a warning, definite, ominous, a few days before, from the lips of Molly Leonard. At that time she had put away her startled uneasiness with a masterful hand, burying it resolutely where she had laid away all the other emotions of her life, under the brown loam of her garden. But it all came back to her now.
Her thin, fluttering, little old friend had begun with tragic emphasis,
"The roof to the library leaks!"
Miss Abigail had laughed as usual at Molly's habit of taking small events with bated breath. "What of it?" she asked. "That roof never was good, even back in the days when 'twas a private house and my great-uncle lived in it."
Miss Molly fluttered still more before the awfulness of her next announcement.