would cheerfully devote fifteen days of incessant stitching at
something she carried round in a sort of drumhead. At the end of
that time she would have completed a more or less intolerable piece
of colored fabric which she called a "drape" or a "throw." It could
not be duplicated at a shop for less than $1.75, and it would wash
perhaps three times.

Mr. Budlong once figured that if sweat-shop proprietors paid wages at
the scale Mrs. Budlong established for herself, all the seamstresses
and seamsters would curl up round their machines and die of
starvation the first week. But he never told Mrs. Budlong this.
Fancy stitching did not earn much, but it did not cost much; and it
kept her mysteriously contented. She was stitching herself to her
own home all the time.

The Christmas presents Mrs. Budlong made herself were not all a
matter of needle and thread. Not at all! One year she turned her
sewing room into a smithy. She gave Mr. and Mrs. Doctor Tisnower the
loveliest hand-hammered brass coal scuttle that ever was seen--and
with a purple ribbon tied to its tail. They kept flowers in it
several summers, till one cruel winter a new servant put coal in it
and completely scuttled it.

The same year she gave Mrs. ex-Mayor Cinnamon a hammered brass
version of a C. D. Gibson drawing. The lady and gentleman looked as
if they had broken out with a combination of yellow fever and
smallpox, or suffered from enlarged pores or something. And the
plum-colored plush frame didn't sit very well on the vermilion wall
paper. But Mrs. Cinnamon hung it over the sofa in the expectation of
changing the paper some day. It stayed there until the fateful