This thought had secretly occurred to many a Dorcas in her hours of
pie-making, preserving, or cradle-rocking, but had been promptly extinguished
as flagrantly extravagant and altogether impossible. Now that it had been
openly mentioned, the contagion of the idea spread, and in a month every sort
of honest machinery for the increase of funds had been set in motion: harvest
suppers, pie sociables, old folks' concerts, apron sales, and, as a last
resort, a subscription paper, for the church floor measured hundreds of square
yards, and the carpet committee announced that a good ingrain could not be
purchased, even with the church discount, for less than ninety-seven cents a
yard.

The Dorcases took out their pencils, and when they multiplied the surface of
the floor by the price of the carpet per yard, each Dorcas attaining a result
entirely different from all the others, there was a shriek of dismay,
especially from the secretary, who had included in her mathematical operation
certain figures in her possession representing the cubical contents of the
church and the offending pitch of the roof, thereby obtaining a product that
would have dismayed a Croesus. Time sped and efforts increased, but the
Dorcases were at length obliged to clip the wings of their desire and content
themselves with carpeting the pulpit and pulpit steps, the choir, and the two
aisles, leaving the floor in the pews until some future year.

How the women cut and contrived and matched that hardly-bought red ingrain
carpet, in the short December afternoons that ensued after its purchase; so
that, having failed to be ready for Thanksgiving, it could be finished for the
Christmas festivities!

They were sewing in the church, and as the last stitches were being taken,
Maria Sharp suddenly ejaculated in her impulsive fashion :--