During the summer, matters at the reading-room and library had been allowed to drift along to a great extent. Marty and one of his particular chums had kept the reading-room open evenings during Mr. Haley's absence; but now Janice knew that the school-teacher would have his hands quite full without giving any time to the reading-room.

She set about making a second campaign for the advancement of the institution and the broadening of its work. She found five girls beside herself willing to keep the reading-room open one afternoon a week, and to exchange books for the members of the library association. The institution had proved its value in the community and Janice privately went to several people who were well able to help, and collected a fund for the payment of a regular librarian in the evening.

One of the boys who had shown most advancement during the spring in school work was glad to earn a small wage as librarian and caretaker of the reading-room evenings. An effort was made, too, to increase the number of volumes in the library so as to obtain a share of the State Library Appropriation for the next year.

Janice was not alone interested in the reading-room's affairs. There was the matter of a new piano for the Sunday-school room. The instrument in use had been a second-hand one when the Sunday School obtained it; and it was forever out of tune.

"However can you expect the children to sing in unison, and sing well, Mr. Scribner," Janice said to the Sunday-school superintendent, "when there isn't an octave in harmony on the old piano? Come on! let's see what we can do about getting a brand-new, first-class instrument?"

"Oh, my dear girl! Impossible! quite impossible!" declared the superintendent, who was a bald, hopeless little man, who kept books for the biggest store in town, and was imbued with the prevailing Poketown spirit of "letting well enough alone."

"How do you know it is impossible till you try?" demanded the girl, laughing. "How much would you give, yourself, toward a new instrument?"

Mr. Scribner winked hard, swallowed, and burst out with: "Ten dollars! Yes, ma'am! I'd go without a new winter overcoat for the sake of having a decent piano."

"That's a beginning," Janice said, gravely, seizing paper and pad. "And I can spare five. Now, don't you see, if we can interest everybody else in town proportionately, we'd have enough to buy two pianos, let alone one.

"But let us start the subscription papers with our own offerings. You take one, and I'll take the other. You can ask everybody who comes into the store, and I'll go out into the highways and hedges and see what I can gather."

Janice interested the young people's society in the project, too; and her own enthusiasm, plus that of the other young folks, brought the thing about. At the usual Sunday-school entertainment on Christmas night the new piano was used for the first time, and Mrs. Ebbie Stewart, who played it, fairly cried into her score book, she was so glad.

"I was so sick of pounding on that old tin-panny thing!" she sobbed.
"A real piano seems too good to be true."

The old Town Hall standing at the head of High Street—just where the street forked to become two country highways—had a fine stick of spruce in front of it for a flagpole; but on holidays the flag that was raised (if the janitor didn't forget it) was tattered like a battle-banner, and, in addition, was of the vintage of a score of years before. Our flag has changed some during the last two decades as to the number of stars and their arrangement on the azure field.

Of a sudden people began to notice the need of a new flag. Who mentioned it first? Why, that Day girl!

And she kept right on mentioning it until some people began to see that it was really a disgrace to Poketown—and almost an insult to the flag itself—to raise such a tattered banner. A grand silk flag, with new halyards and all, was finally obtained, the Congressman of the district having been interested in the affair. And on Washington's Birthday the Congressman himself visited the village and made an address when the flag was raised for the first time.

Gradually, other improvements and changes had taken place in Poketown. There was the steamboat dock. It had been falling to pieces for years. It had originally been built by the town; but the various storekeepers were most benefited by the wharf, for their freight came by water for more than half of the year.

Walky Dexter started the subscription among the merchants for the dock repairs. He subscribed a fair sum himself, too, for he was the principal teamster in Poketown.

"But who d'you s'pose started Walky?" demanded Mr. Cross Moore, shrewdly. "Trace it all back to one 'live wire'—that's what! If that Day gal didn't put the idee into Walky's head for a new dock, I'll eat my hat!"

And nobody asked Mr. Moore to try that gastronomic feat.

The selectman, himself, seemed to get into line during that winter. He stopped sneering at Walky Dexter and for some inexplicable reason he began agitating for better health ordinances.

There was an unreasonable warm spell in February; people in Poketown had always had open garbage piles during the winter. From this cause Dr. Poole, the Health Officer, declared, a diphtheria epidemic started which caused several deaths and necessitated the closing of a part of the school for four weeks.

Cross Moore put through a garbage-collection ordinance and a certain farmer out of town was glad of the chance to make a daily collection, the year around, for the value of the garbage and the small bonus the town allowed him. If the truth were known Mr. Moore's ordinance was copied almost word for word from the printed pamphlet of ordinances in force in a certain town of the Middle West called Greensboro. Now, how did the selectman obtain that pamphlet, do you suppose?

Yet Poketown, as a whole, looked about as forlorn and unsightly as it had when Janice Day first saw it. The improvement was not general. The malady—general neglect—had only been treated in spots.

There were still stores with their windows heaped with flyspecked goods. The horses still gnawed the boles of the shade trees along High Street. The flagstone sidewalks were still broken and the gutters unsightly. High street itself was rutted and muddy all through the early spring, after the snow had gone.

A few of the merchants patterned after Hopewell Drugg, brightened up their stores, and exposed only fresh goods for sale. But these few changes only made the general run of Poketown institutions appear more slovenly. The contrast was that of a new pair of shoes, or a glossy hat, on a ragged beggar!

With Janice on one side to spur him, and Miss 'Rill's unbounded faith in him on the other hand, how could Hopewell Drugg fall back into the old aimless existence which had cursed him when first Janice had taken an interest in his little Lottie, his store, and himself?

But, of course, Hopewell could not make trade. He had gained his full share of the Poketown patronage, and held all his old customers. But the profits of the business accumulated slowly. As this second winter drew to a close the storekeeper confessed to Janice that he had only saved a little over three hundred dollars altogether towards the betterment of Lottie's condition.

Janice began secretly to complain. Her heart bled for the child, shut away in the dark and silence. If only Daddy would grow suddenly very wealthy out of the mine! Or if some fairy godmother would come to little Lottie's help!

The person who seemed nearest like a fairy godmother to the child was Miss 'Rill. She spent a great deal of her spare time with the storekeeper's daughter. Sometimes she went to Mr. Drugg's cottage alone; but oftener she had Lottie around to the rooms she occupied with her mother on High Street.

"I declare for't, 'Rill," sputtered old Mrs Scattergood, one day when Janice happened to be present, "you'll have the hull town talkin' abeout you. You're in an' aout of Hopewell Drugg's jest as though you belonged there."

"I'm surely doing no harm, mother," said the little spinster, mildly.
"Everyone knows how this poor child needs somebody's care."

"Wal! let the 'somebody' be somebody else," snapped the old lady. "I sh'd think you'd be ashamed."

"Ashamed of what, mother?" asked Miss 'Rill, with more spirit than she usually displayed.

"You know well enough what I mean. Folks will say you're flingin' yourself at Hopewell Drugg's head. An' after all these years, too. I——"

"Mother!" exclaimed her daughter, in a low voice, but earnestly. "Don't you think you did harm enough long, long ago, without beginning on that tack now?"

"There! that's the thanks one gets when one keeps a gal from makin' a perfect fule of herself," cried the old lady, bridling. "S'pose you'd been jest a drudge for Hopewell, all these years, Amarilla Scattergood?"

"I might not have been a drudge," said Miss 'Rill, softly, flushing over her needlework. "At least my life—and his—would have been different."

"Ye don't know how lucky you be," snapped her mother. "And this is all the thanks I git for tellin' Hopewell Drugg that he'd brought his pigs to the wrong market."

"At least," said the spinster, with a sigh, "he will never worry you on that score again, mother—he nor any other man. When a woman gets near to forty, with more silver than gold in her hair, and the best of her useless life is behind her, she need expect no change in her estate, that's sure."

"Ye might be a good deal wuss off," sniffed her mother.

"Perhaps that is so," agreed Miss 'Rill, with a sudden hard little laugh. "But don't you take pattern by me, Janice, no matter what folks tell you. Mrs. Beasely is better off than I am. She has the memory of doing for somebody whom she loved and who loved her. While I——Well, I'm just an old maid, and when you say that about a woman, you say the worst!"

"Why, the idee!" exclaimed her mother, with wrath. "I call that flyin' right in the face of Providence."

"I don't believe that God ever had old maids in the original scheme of things."

"Humph! didn't He?" snapped Mrs. Scattergood. "Then why is there so many more women than men in the world? Will you please tell me that, Amarilla?" and this unanswerable argument closed what Janice realized was not the first discussion of the unpleasant topic, between the ex-schoolteacher and her sharp-tongued mother.