A number of young people, mostly girls, were busily engaged in decorating a church for the Harvest Festival services on the following day. Flowers, fruit, vegetables, loaves of all sizes and corn in sheaves, or shaped into miniature stacks, had been sent in abundance. The poorest members of the congregation were not the least willing givers. They could not offer hot-house grapes or fruits that were costly to mature, but they brought of their best from cottage gardens and in no stinted measure. The clean, ruddy carrots, white turnips, cauliflowers in their nest of green leaves, with other homely vegetables, the best of their kind, added much to the picturesqueness of the offerings.
The pulpit and font were bordered with green moss on which were pretty devices in scarlet berries, and below these hung a fringe of oats, dainty-looking, light and graceful as lace. There was a foot of this fringing to finish when the material ran short.
“More oats wanted,” said the worker. “Bring me some, please.”
But none were forthcoming.
“You have used them all,” was the answer.
“I cannot fill this space with anything else. The design would be spoiled. There seemed to be any quantity of oats, but this fringe takes so much. Who will give us some more?”
Nobody seemed to know and time was precious. At last a girl spoke, though in a rather shamefaced way and in a hesitating tone.
“I know who would give us a bundle of oat straw. We could pick out the best pieces and by mixing them in with the unthreshed corn, the length could be made up. There would be some undoing and working up again, but I don’t think anybody would notice the difference.”
There was a short uncomfortable silence, soon broken by the tremulous voice of the youngest helper present—a mere child.
“Oh, we must not, we must not do that. It would be horrid to pretend to give the best corn that has been grown, to try and show God how thankful we are, and then for Him to see that there is ever so much empty straw amongst it. It’s all very well to say that we could make the fringe look as if it were real corn and nobody would find out, but God would know, and——”