"Well, I've got that. Mrs. Sims, she gave me an old battered and bruised one, when they were moving. It is big enough to put all the cups and saucers on in town, almost; when I lugged it home, Job, he wanted to know what on earth I wanted of that, and says I, I don't know, but she give it to me, and most everything in this world comes good, if you keep it long enough. Sarah Ann, you run up to the corner in the back garret and get that thing, and see what they'll make of it."
So Sarah Ann ran.
CHAPTER XII.
AN UNEXPECTED HELPER.
PERHAPS you do not see how the pond lilies, lovely as they were, arranged on that salver, helped Jerry and Nettie in their plans for Norm and his friends. But there is another part to that story.
After the salver had been filled with sand, and covered with moss, and soaked until it would absorb no more water, and the lilies had been laid in so thickly that they looked like a great white bank of bloom, the whole was lovely, as I said, but heavy. The walk to the church was long, and Nettie, thinking of it, surveyed her finished work with a grave face. How was it ever to be gotten to the church? She tried to lift one end of it, and shook her head. There was no hope that she could even help carry it for so long a distance. Mrs. Smith saw the trouble in her eyes, and guessed at its cause. "It is an awful heavy thing, that's a fact," she said, "hefting" it in her strong arms; "I don't know how you are going to manage it; Sarah Jane would help in a minute, but there's her back; she ain't got no back to speak of, Sarah Jane hasn't. And there's Job, he ain't at home; he went this morning before it was light, away over the other side of the clip hill with a load, and the last words he says to me was: 'Don't you be scairt if I don't get round very early; them roads over there is dreadful heavy, and I shall have to rest the team in the heat of the day,' and like enough he won't get back till nigh ten o'clock."
Certainly no help could be expected from the Smith family. "We shall have to take some of the sand out," said Nettie, surveying the mound regretfully; "I'm real sorry; it does look so pretty heaped up! but Jerry can never carry it away down there alone."
Then came Jerry's bright idea. "I'll get Norman to help me."
"Norm!" said Nettie, stopping astonished in the very act of picking out some of the lilies. It had not once occurred to her that Norm could be asked to go to the church on an errand. She couldn't have told why, but Norm and the church seemed too far apart to have anything in common.