Even if girls are as tall as their mothers they have a deep, if unconfessed, interest in dolls; so Mrs. Abbott’s girls responded very willingly to an appeal from a mission school in New York for fifty dolls’ costumes. A toy merchant of benevolent disposition had presented the mission with two hundred unclad dolls, and the dressing of all but fifty were provided for. Mrs. Abbott advised taking only twenty-five, but her scholars insisted on the whole number. A very large box of silks, satins, cashmeres, and other gatherings from kindly disposed milliners and dress-makers accompanied the dolls, and the spare room was turned into a workshop and the spare bed into a depository for dolls in every stage of dressing. As fast as each one was fully dressed it was laid tenderly away in a bureau drawer.

Miss Blake and Mrs. Abbott helped the younger girls, who sewed the garments after they were cut out. But all who had skill enough to do it dressed the dolls without assistance, and costumed them very much as they pleased; so there was a great variety. There were German peasants, Roman and Breton peasants, sailor girls and boys, infants and fine ladies, grandmothers and French nurses, Scotch lassies and coal-black Dinahs. But each doll, whether she resembled a princess or peasant, had clothes that would come off and go on, and the sewing was carefully done and the button-holes were highly commendable.

The dolls were to be given at Christmas to poor children who might learn some lessons of neatness and propriety from the well-made, well-adjusted clothes, and, as Mrs. Abbott said, “What is worth doing at all is worth doing well;” so there was no slighting, or what Marion expressively called “cobbling.”

The day scholars came afternoons to help, and really the task of dressing the fifty dolls was lighter than it sounds, and Mrs. Abbott admitted that the girls knew better than she did when they carried the point of speaking for fifty instead of twenty-five.

There was a strange lack of ribbons among the scraps and gleanings that came in the box of materials, and as it is a well-known fact that some costumes are barren and incomplete without sashes, shoulder-knots, and such adornments, it seemed to the busy girls that even the plainest of the dolls needed some finishing touches that only ribbons could give.

Delia Howland proposed taking up a penny collection, as they sometimes did to buy popping corn; but some mental calculation showed that even if the appeal met a favorable response in every case thirty cents would be the sum total of the collection, and that would go only a lamentably small way in ribbons.

After some discussion an improvement was made on the plan, and scholars and teachers were visited by a committee of two, who presented a neatly written sheet stating the case thus:

“Know all ladies and girls by these presents, that in this comfortable and well-arranged house fifty small but beauteous creatures are suffering for the want of ribbon. Many of the sufferers have not been seen to smile since their destitution became apparent. Others are cold and rigid in their stony despair.

“Sisters, shall such things be?

“Give, sisters, give of your abundance.

“Donations of money in sums not less than five and not more than twenty-five cents are respectfully solicited by the committee, who pledge themselves to see that the offerings are not squandered for any purpose but the one mentioned.

“N. B.—A small tin bank will be placed upon the hall table, and people who wish to give more than the largest sum mentioned above are at liberty to drop coin in.

“N. B.—Buttons or broken sleeve-links dropped in the bank will be traced to their source by experienced experts, and humiliation will follow.”

This high-sounding document proved very efficacious, and Bell Burgoyne and Fannie Holmes, the anonymous committee, found themselves in possession of five dollars from the collection and two dollars which were revealed by the opening of the little tin bank.

That was an unnecessarily large sum to spend for ribbon, Miss Blake said, and proposed that the boxing and expressing back of the dressed dolls should be paid out of it, and if any were still left after the purchases were judiciously made it should be deposited in the tin bank as a nest-egg, not for a rainy day, but for a day when Mrs. Abbott’s brother should come, as he had promised to make her a visit, and tell them stories that would, as Lily had said once, wring their hearts, and their purses, too, and make them long to give even a trifle of help to the unhappy creatures he told them of, whose only crime was their being girls.

For Mr. Eaton was a returned missionary, laid aside from his work, long before years or failing health had enfeebled him, by an accident which had nearly destroyed his sight. He was intending to spend the Christmas holidays with his sister, and the girls, who remembered his visit of last year with pleasure, were glad to know that they should find him at school when they returned from their two-weeks’ vacation.

Edna shrugged her shoulders when she heard the others rejoicing at the prospect of having this minister in the house.

“You’re a queer lot, here,” she said. “Now, at Madame de Lanay’s all the girls thought ministers were horrid, stiff, solemn things, looking shocked if any one laughed and all the time poking texts at people. Goodness! It makes me low-spirited just to think of being in the house with one of the walking funerals.”

“Walking funerals!” and Delia Howland burst into shrieks of laughter. “Why, Edna, my father’s a minister, and he is the liveliest, jolliest man I ever saw.”

“Well, I’m sure I beg your pardon, Del, for not remembering there was a minister’s daughter present, and I’m sure it’s very nice in you to think so much of your father.”

“Yes, it’s very obliging of her,” said Lily, dryly; “but Delia’s father, nice as he is, is not the only cheerful minister. You will have to change your mind, if you think they are all a mournful lot, when you see Mr. Eaton. He has had sorrow upon sorrow, Mrs. Abbott says, and yet he is so cheerful that he brightens up the whole house.”