Clover and Blue Grass

by Eliza Calvert Hall

"Then you must let me pay you," cried Mary. "I really mean it, John. You must let me have my way. I know you're hard run just now, and I never would have bought the chart, if I had not intended paying for it myself."

She tried to open John's hand to put the money in it, but John took hold of her hand and gave her a gentle shove toward the foot of the stairs.

"Go on and put up your money, Mary," he said. "If half that agent fellow said is true, I'm in about a hundred and fifty dollars. Before long, I reckon, you'll be makin' my coats and pants and the harness for the horses by this here chart."

And Mary went, but her gentle protestations could be heard even after she reached her room and had dropped the money back into the little box that was her savings bank.

She hurried through her after-supper tasks, her mind full of the cutting and fitting she wanted to do before bed-time. Hers was a soul that found its highest happiness in work, and she unfolded the chart with the delight of a child who has a new toy. The agent's tribute to her knowledge of mathematics was no idle flattery. Her quick brain had comprehended at once the system of the chart, and she flushed with excitement and pleasure as she bent over her scale and found that her measurements and calculations were resulting in patterns of unmistakable correctness and style. It was like solving the fifth proposition of Euclid. She laid aside her work that night with a reluctant sigh, but a happy anticipation of the sewing yet to come. The anticipation was fulfilled next day by the completion of a shirt waist so striking in design and fit that even John noticed its beauty and becomingness and acknowledged that the chart was "no humbug."

"You must wear that waist Monday when we go to town," he declared. "I never saw anything fit you as pretty as that does," and Sally McElrath echoed John's opinion when she and Mary met at the linen counter of Brown and Company's dry goods store; and Mary told her of the wonderful chart as they both examined patterns and qualities of table linen and compared experiences as to wearing qualities of bleached and unbleached damask.

There is a system of communication in every country neighborhood that is hardly less marvelous than the telegraph and telephone; and before Mary could put her chart to a second test, all Goshen knew that Mary Crawford had a chart that would cut anything from a baby sacque to a bolero, and that she was willing to lend it to any one who was inclined to borrow.

Sally McElrath was the first applicant for the loan of the chart. Whatever the enterprise, if it had the feature of novelty, Sally was its first patron and promoter. But her promptness ended here, and her friends declared that Sally McElrath was always the first to begin a thing, and the last to finish it.

Accompanying the chart was a set of explicit rules for its use, and Mary read these to Sally, explaining all the difficult points just as the agent had explained them to her.

"Now if I were you, Sally," she said warningly, "I would try some simple thing first, a child's apron, or something like that, so that you won't run the risk of ruining any expensive goods. Everything takes practice, you know."