parlor. Before she launched on such a story she liked to get her feet up a little on a hassock—she had been on them all day—her white apron well spread, and her sturdy arms lying comfortably across her generous waist-line.
“You see, we had needed a bigger school for years back and the trustees always said the section couldn’t afford one. Finally it got to the place where the little ones were to be allowed to come only half a day, and the children from back on the mountain, who needed schooling the most, were to be shut out altogether. It was then the Women’s Institute got into it. When this order came up we knew the thing couldn’t wait any longer, and we called a meeting about it. Someone thought of the old car that had been standing on the siding for years, waiting for the company to haul it away for firewood, and we got right up from the meeting and went across in a body and looked it over. Some of the seats were broken but the walls were solid as a church. We got the trustees out to look at it, and we sent two of them down to see the agent in the city—we didn’t go ourselves because we’re old-fashioned women up here, and we don’t believe in women running things. The company said we could have the car for nothing; so the institute made a bee—that is, we invited the men to it, and they brought their teams and hauled the car down to the school. The women fixed it up ready for the children to move into it.
“The next thing we wanted to do was to start a hot lunch for the children. Some of us had gone down to Toronto to the Institutes’ convention, and heard how the city schools had brought ill-nourished children up to strength by giving them hot cocoa at noon. Well, we came back home and we said to ourselves, if those children needed a drink of hot cocoa at noon, surely our children, that walked a mile or two miles to school through rain and snow, and carried a cold dinner with them—surely they would be the better for it too. We hadn’t any equipment like they had in the city—no domestic science kitchen with nice little gas plates and aluminum ware, but I lent my tea-kettle and Mrs. Applegath lent her dish-pan, and every child brought its own cup and spoon; the institute bought the sugar and cocoa and the parents sent the milk, and it all worked so well that this year we’ve bought dishes and a coal-oil stove with an oven, where they can bake potatoes and such. And if the children here aren’t as well nourished as the best they have in town, it won’t be our fault.”
She told them of other equally ambitious ventures—how the cemetery had been a real disgrace to the place until the women got at it, planned a stumping-bee to clear away the brush, inviting the men with their teams and giving them a good dinner “to make it sociable,” how
they had taken flower seeds and slips from their geraniums and planted flowers on every grave they could find, and how Jim Black and Huldy Adams, who hadn’t spoken since their fathers quarrelled over their rights to water their cattle at the creek that ran between their pastures, had gone home reconciled because Jim saw Huldy down on her knees planting a border of sweet alyssum around his father’s grave-stone.
She was loath to let them go. She had many other things to tell them. And when they finally did convince her of their necessity to be away, she followed them to the gate, her bare, capable arms rolled in her apron, and she watched with interest while Billy extricated a coat, evidently his own, from the back seat of the car, and buttoned the girl into it. Such attentions had long ago slipped out of her own life, nor did she particularly miss them; but she could enjoy their observance in the lives of others just as she enjoyed the weekly instalment of breath-taking romance in the local newspaper.
“Well now!” she breathed, when the rite had been performed, “I hope, Miss Macdonald, you’ll get a man that’ll always be as kind to you as that.”
“I hope so,” Ruth acknowledged, humbly.
“Oh, she will,” Billy hastened to put in, for some reason addressing himself quite as much to Ruth as to the other woman.
“Well, now!” the inquisitive one exclaimed again, her brow clearing. She had found out what she wanted to know. “I fancied so, I’m real glad to hear it. I think you’ll get on fine.”