The foundations thus laid, the setting of the table had been a delightful
task for Mrs. Kelcey, assisted as she was by Mrs. Murdison, who
frequently differed from her in points of arrangement but who yielded
most of them upon hearing, as she frequently did, Mrs. Kelcey's verbal
badge of office: "Misther Brown put me in charge, Missus Murdison. He
says to me, he says, 'Missus Kelcey, do jist as ye think best.'" Together
the two had achieved a triumph, and the table now stood forth glowingly
ready for its sixteen guests, from the splendid bunch of scarlet
geraniums in an immense pink and blue bowl with an Indian's head on one
side, to the sixteen chairs, no two exactly alike, which had been
obtained from half as many houses.

As for the dinner itself, there was no patchwork about that. Brown
himself had supplied the essentials, trusting that the most of his guests
could have no notion whatever of the excessively high cost of turkeys
that season, or of the price of the especial quality of butter and eggs
which he handed over to Mrs. Kelcey to be used in the preparation of the
dishes which he and she had decided upon. That lady, however, had had
some compunctions as she saw the unstinted array of materials an
astonished grocer's boy had delivered upon her kitchen table two days
before the dinner, and had expressed herself to Mrs. Murdison as
concerned lest Mr. Brown had spent more than he could well afford.

"'Tis the big hearrt of him that leads his judgment asthray," she said,
exulting none the less, as she spoke, over the prospect of handling all
those rich materials and for once having the chance to display her
skilled cookery. "I said as much as I dared, lest I hurrt his pride,
but--'Tis but wanct a year, Missus Kelcey,' says he, an' I said no more."