witness in their aisles during the last weeks of Yuletide and the
aftermath of trying to collect from the Gentile husbands during
Billtide.

Mrs. Budlong's Christmas presents were of two sorts: those she made
herself and those she made her husband pay for. He was the typical
husband who never fails to settle his wife's bills, so long as he may
raise a row about them till his wife cries and looks like an
expensive luxury which only a really successful man could afford.
Then he subsides until the first of the next month.




II

CHRONICLES OF A CRAFTSMAN

Mrs. Budlong's campaign was undertaken with the same farsightedness
as a magazine editor's. On or about the Fourth of July she began to
worry and plan. By the second week in August she had her tatting
well under way. By the middle of September she was getting in her
embroidered doilies. The earliest frost rarely surprised her with
her quilts untufted. And when the first snow flew, her sachet bags
were all stuffed and smelly.

She was very feminine in her sense of the value of her own time. At
missionary meetings she would shed tears over the pathetic pictures
of Oriental women who spent a year weaving a rug which would sell for
a paltry hundred dollars and last a mere century or two. Then she