The red ingrain carpet was indeed very warm, beautiful, and comforting to
the eye, and the sisters were suitably grateful to Providence, and
devoutly thankful to themselves, that they had been enabled to buy, sew,
and lay so many yards of it. But as they stood looking at their
completed task, it was cruelly true that there was much left to do.

The aisles had been painted dark brown on each side of the red strips
leading from the doors to the pulpit, but the rest of the church floor
was "a thing of shreds and patches." Each member of the carpet committee
had paid (as a matter of pride, however ill she could afford it) three
dollars and sixty-seven cents for sufficient carpet to lay in her own
pew; but these brilliant spots of conscientious effort only made the
stretches of bare, unpainted floor more evident. And that was not all.
Traces of former spasmodic and individual efforts desecrated the present
ideals. The doctor's pew had a pink and blue Brussels on it; the
lawyer's, striped stair-carpeting; the Browns from Deerwander sported
straw matting and were not abashed; while the Greens, the Whites, the
Blacks and the Greys displayed floor coverings as dissimilar as their
names.

"I never noticed it before!" exclaimed Maria Sharp, "but it ain't
Christian, that floor! it's heathenish and ungodly!"

"For mercy's sake, don't swear, Maria," said Mrs. Miller nervously.
"We've done our best, and let's hope that folks will look up and not
down. It isn't as if they were going to set in the chandelier; they'll
have something else to think about when Nancy gets her hemlock branches
and white carnations in the pulpit vases. This morning my Abner picked
off two pinks from the plant I've been nursing in my dining-room for