lily had done it all, just by showing, in its whiteness, how grimy everything
else was."

The minister's wife, who had been in Edgewood only a few months, looked
admiringly at Nancy's bright face, wondering that five-and-thirty years of
life, including ten of school-teaching, had done so little to mar its
serenity.

"The lily story is as true as the gospel!" she exclaimed, "and I can see how
one thing has led you to another in making the church comfortable. But my
husband says that two coats of paint on the pews would cost a considerable
sum."

"How about cleaning them? I don't believe they've had a good hard washing
since the flood." The suggestion came from Deacon Miller's wife to the
president.

"They can't even be scrubbed for less than fifteen or twenty dollars, for I
thought of that and asked Mrs. Simpson yesterday, and she said twenty cents a
pew was the cheapest she could do it for."

"We've done everything else," said Nancy Wentworth, with a twitch of her
thread; "why don't we scrub the pews? There's nothing in the Orthodox creed to
forbid, is there?"

"Speakin' o' creeds," and here old Mrs. Sargent paused in her work, "Elder
Ransom from Acreville stopped with us last night, an' he tells me they recite
the Euthanasian Creed every few Sundays in the Episcopal Church. I did n't
want him to know how ignorant I was, but I looked up the word in the
dictionary. It means easy death, and I can't see any sense in that, though