"Mine was a sand-bag. Didn't you hear Minnie say, 'Mamma, the sheet is quite wet just where my foot comes;' and Mrs. Banister came in a hurry and took away the hot-water bag, and said there was something wrong with the screw, and it was always leaking? My aunt, who is an invalid, uses a bag of sand instead. It is made very hot in the oven and slipped into a little cover, and it keeps warm longer than hot water does, she says. Don't you think we might make one for Minnie?"
"It's the best idea yet," said Catherine. "And we will have it for next Saturday because it's something useful that she really wants, and that will give us plenty of time to dry the leaves for the Saturday after."
The sand-bag, with its little slip cover of red canton flannel, proved a remarkable success. It was the comfort of her life, Minnie declared; but the joy of her life was the wall-basket which followed on the next Saturday, and which made a beautiful spot of brightness on the bare wall. Ethel Hooper, who had a natural instinct for color and effect, arranged it. It held branches of deep red and vivid yellow leaves, with sprays of orange and green sumach, deep russet oak and trails of flaming blackberry-vine, amid which rose a few velvet-brown cat-tails and fluffy milk-weed pods, supporting in their midst a tiny bird's nest poised in a leafless twig. Minnie was never tired of looking at it. She said it was as good as taking a walk in the woods to see it. The gay color refreshed her eyes, and cheered many a dull moment when she was alone and did not feel like reading; and, altogether, the wall-basket proved one of the most successful of the achievements of the Do Something Society that winter.
I have not time to tell you of all the many other things they did. One Saturday the gift was a home-made sponge-cake. Another time it was some particularly nice molasses candy, pulled very white, and braided and twirled into M's and B's. A pillow stuffed with balsam-fir was another of the presents. On Christmas Eve they carried her the tiniest little fir-tree ever seen, a mere baby of a fir, planted in a flower-pot, hung with six mandarin oranges, and lighted with wax matches which burned just long enough to be admired and no longer. Later there was a comical valentine, and on Minnie's birthday a pretty card, designed by Catherine, who had a taste for drawing.
One melancholy Saturday, when Minnie was too ill to see them, the members all left their cards in a little basket. Another time it was the cards of all their pet cats. And while they thus labored to make the hard months less hard for their friend, their own souls were growing, keeping pace with their growing bodies, as souls do which are properly exercised in deeds of kindliness and unselfish love. So that when spring came, bringing roses back to Minnie's pale cheeks, and strength to her feeble limbs, and she was able to take her place among the rest and be a "Do Something" too, all of them were eager to keep on, and to continue the work begun for one, by service for the many who needed cheering as much as Minnie had done.
And the best part of the lesson which all of them had learned was, so Mrs. Newcombe thought, the great lesson that money, though a useful, is not an essential, part of true helpfulness, and that time given, and thought, and observation, and ingenuity, and loving hearts, can accomplish without it all the best and sweetest part of giving.
[WHO ATE THE QUEEN'S LUNCHEON?]
YOU can imagine the state of excitement into which Otillie Le Breton was thrown, when, one day in June, her father, the Seigneur of Sark, came home and told her that the Queen, who was cruising about the Channel in the royal yacht, had notified him of her intention of landing at Sark the next Thursday and of lunching at the Seigneurie.