“O, I don’t count those things boys,” said Kittie. “They’re just dolls; and if there’s anything I always despised, it’s boy-dolls.”
“What do you think girls could do, Kittie?” asked Bess, “when they don’t have lessons to get, I mean.”
“I think they could make useful things to give poor people,” answered Kittie, her gray eyes sparkling with earnestness. “If we put the same amount of time into making up nice, plain clothes for poor people—special poor people, I mean, that we could find out about, ourselves—that we do into ‘crochet,’ as Tom says—what a lot of things we could make and give away in one winter!”
“I never could bear to sew,” sighed Pet, surveying her pretty, plump fingers. “It seems just old ladies’ work, pulling over rag-bags and ‘piecing’ together. It’s dreadful, trying to save.”
“It depends on what you do with the rags,” said Randolph. “My grandmother had one of those bags that she was always using out of, and yet ’twas always full of rags, just crammed, so you couldn’t pull the puckers of the bag together at the top.”
“What ever did she make with them?”
“Mats and carpets, mostly. That is, she didn’t make ’em herself, but used to hire poor people to make ’em, after she’d showed them how. She’d always arrange it so’s to help two at once. ‘It’s better,’ she used to say, ‘to feed two birds with one crumb, than kill them with a stone.’”
“Why, how did she do it?” queried practical Bess, much interested.
“She’d find out through the city missionaries generally, some woman that was awfully poor, and she’d send for her and say, ‘I know a family down in such a street that are very poor; they earn just enough to live on—not enough to walk on, for they haven’t any carpets on their bare floors, this cold weather.’”
“Well?”