EVENING BEFORE PAY-DAY.
CHAPTER I.
"To-morrow is pay-day; are you not glad, Rosina, and Lucy? Dorcas is, I know; for she always loves to see the money. Don't I speak truth now, Miss Dorcas Tilton?"
"I wish you would stop your clack, Miss Noisy Impudence; for I never heard you speak anything that was worth an answer. Let me alone, for I have not yet been able to obtain a moment's time to read my tract."
"'My tract'—how came it 'my tract,' Miss Stingy Oldmaid?—for I can call names as fast as you," was the reply of Elizabeth Walters. "Not because you bought it, or paid for it, or gave a thank'ee to those who did; but because you lay your clutches upon every thing you can get without downright stealing."
"Well," replied Dorcas, "I do not think I have clutched any thing now which was much coveted by anyone else."
"You are right, Dorcas," said Rosina Alden, lifting her mild blue eye for the first time towards the speakers; "the tracts left here by the monthly distributors are thrown about, and trampled under foot, even by those who most approve the sentiments which they contain. I have not seen anyone take them up to read but yourself."
"She likes them," interrupted the vivacious Elizabeth, "because she gets them for nothing. They come to her as cheap as the light of the sun, or the dews of heaven; and thus they are rendered quite as valuable in her eyes."
"And that very cheapness, that freedom from exertion and expense by which they are obtained, is, I believe, the reason why they are generally so little valued," added Rosina. "People are apt to think things worthless which come to them so easily. They believe them cheap, if they are offered cheap. Now I think, without saying one word against those tracts, that they would be more valued, more perused, and exert far more influence, if they were only to be obtained by payment for them. If they do good now, it is to the publishers only; for I do not think the community in general is influenced by them in the slightest degree. If Dorcas feels more interested in them because she procures them gratuitously, it is because she is an exception to the general rule."
"I like sometimes," said Dorcas, "to see the voice of instruction, of warning, of encouragement, and reproof, coming to the thoughtless, ignorant, poor and sinful, as it did from him who said to those whom he sent to inculcate its truths, Freely ye have received, freely give. The gospel is an expensive luxury now, and those only who can afford to pay their four, or six, or more, dollars a year, can hear its truths from the successors of him who lifted his voice upon the lonely mountain, and opened his lips for council at the table of the despised publican, or under the humble roof of the Magdalen."