"Makes going to church seem worth while, for a fact," returned his neighbor.
Not till the last vehicle had passed from sight did the widow look round upon what her neighbors had left her, and then she saw sufficient pantry stores to last even seven growing boys for a month. And among the rest of her gifts she found coal for a week. She had not noticed her sons as she busily took account of her stock, but when she had finished she said, "B'ys, b'ys! 'tis your father sees the hearts of these good people this day and rej'ices. Ah, but Tim was a ginerous man himsilf! It's hopin' I am you'll all be loike him."
That night when the younger boys were in bed and only Pat and Mike sat keeping her company, the widow rose from her seat, went to a box already packed and took therefrom an account book and pencil.
"They're your father's," she said, "but it's a good use I'll be puttin' 'em to."
Writing was, for the hand otherwise capable, a laborious task; but no help would she have from either of her sons.
"May I ask you not to be spakin'?" she said politely to the two. "It's not used to writin' I am, and I must be thinkin' besides."
Two hours she sat there, her boys glancing curiously at her now and then at first, and later falling into a doze in their chairs. She wrote two words and stopped. Over and over she wrote two words and stopped. Over and over until she had written two words and stopped fifty times. And often she wiped away her tears. At last her task was done, and there in the book, the letters misshapen and some of the words misspelled, were the names of all who had come to her that morning. Just fifty there were of them. She read them over carefully to see that she had not forgotten any.
"Maybe I'll be havin' the chance to do 'em a good turn some day," she said. "I will, if I can. But whether I do or not, I've got it here in writin', that when all was gone, and I didn't have nothin', the Lord sint fifty friends to help me out. Let me be gettin' down in the heart and discouraged again, and I'll take this book and read the Lord's doin's for me. Come Pat and Moike! It's to bed you must be goin', for we're to move to-morrow, do you moind?"