T MAY be a light question, this buying of a carpet, for people who flit and come with the seasons, or who indulge in fresh furnishings with every change of fashion. When you come to such a carpet as this, the carpet of a lifetime, it is a very different matter. Its texture was the subject of months of deliberation. There was a time when Miss Hetty contemplated a simple matting of the plainest and cheapest sort; but her friends, notably Miss Susan O'Rafferty, a young lady with a broad knowledge of the world and much decision of character, resolutely opposed her.

"An' where wud your mattin' be, wance Robbie Ferguson stumped across it with his crutch, or Jimmy Donovan tuk wan av his slides upon it?" demanded Susan derisively. "Ingrain or three-ply might be standin' some chance, or that new India weave that Mrs. Lorrance do be puttin' down in her sewin'-room last week. my parrt, I'm free to confiss I'm for a good Body Brussels with fast colors that 'll not be fadin' in the sun. There's a weave that 'd last ye a lifetoime. The dearest's the chapest in the ind an' don't you forgit it!"

For

It was with much trepidation and doubt, and only after many a sharp contest with that silent mentor within, that Miss Hetty came to the Body Brussels. The mention of Robbie was not the best calculated to stimulate her wavering resolution. RobRobbie's pale face and wistful eyes had come between her and every piece of silver she had dropped into the little Japanese box since the old carpet yawned with holes that no further darning or patching could disguise, and no redistribution of the furniture cover.

It was an honest old carpet-" Pure wool, every thread of it," Miss Hetty assured her friends, when its day of doom could no longer be deferred. Old carpets have their associations, and there were memories attached to this great square of ragged three-ply. One of the side breadths vaunted a brilliant spot of purple, recording the bottle of ink that Jimmy Donovan

had upset while Miss Hetty patiently taught him how to form the pothooks over which his teacher had labored with him in vain. About the hearth were ragged edges, kicked out by the restless feet of the young people who gathered about the fire on winter evenings to listen to Miss Hetty's stories. Under one window was a place where the little feet of Effie Ferguson, Robbie's baby sister, had worn a threadbare spot, in the days when Miss Hetty had taken the little one to herself after the foolish young mother had deserted husband and children. There was a little grave at Lone Mountain that Miss Hetty and Robbie sometimes visited on pleasant days, but she could never bear to look long at that worn place by the window.

Yet the prevailing atmosphere of the room was one of cheer. It was a very "sizable" room, as Miss Hetty often remarked. When one attempts to eat and live and work and sleep and entertain one's friends within four walls, those walls may well fall back a little, to give breathing-space between. There were not too many breathing-spaces in Hampton Court.

Hampton Court is not, as its name might inislead some one into imagining, an aristocratic and pretentious place of residence. In its day it probably had its ambitions and its airs, but its day is long past. Miss Hetty's room was in the large, dingy old house that stood at the head of the court; a comfortable home in its time, until the city stole around it and amputated its grounds, to slice them into building-lots. Grim walls now pressed it on every side save one, where a narrow strip of earth, faithfully tended by Miss Hetty, was gay with blossoming plants and nourished the staid old English ivy that mounted to the roof and hid the sooty figures along the stuccoed cornice. On sunshiny days, when her windows were raised and the muslin curtains parted, the sweet odors of an old-fashioned garden stole into the room, cheering and brightening the day unaccountably.

The furnishings were very simple and

homely. Behind a bamboo screen, discreetly shut off from public observation, was a tiny cooking apartment with gasoline stove and compact storeroom, which might have served as a text for a small sermon upon economy in domestic arrangements, in some assemblage of progressive women, although its mistress was neither progressive nor given to attending assemblages of women. A sewingmachine, a few Windsor chairs, large and small, a solid reading-table that stood in the center of the room, a bookcase and an old claw-foot desk of polished rosewood that had belonged to the little woman's grandfather, were the most conspicuous articles of furniture.

Miss Hetty's sleeping arrangements were a mystery to all but her most intimate friends. The truth is that her folding bed shut up decorously into a bookcase by day. This ingenious invention had its virtues and its vices, albeit this latter term may seem a harsh word to apply to an inanimate structure of wood, which had had nothing at all to say in the plan of its creation. It made it necessary to rise at a very early hour, in order to get the bedding properly aired and folded away before any chance visitor should arrive. It had a hideous fashion of violently attempting to rush into hiding upon any unwary movement of its occupant, suggestive of a sudden and horrible snuffing out of the vital spark.

"But then," as Miss Hetty blithely remarked, "it was so handy to have the shelves of books within easy reach just above one's head, in case one should be sick."

Miss Hetty, it is true, had her ailments, as who has not? But as she had not once in twenty-five years seen a day when she was not able to "keep round," and as she belonged to the type of chipper, nervy little women who are popularly supposed, when their career of earthly usefulness is erded, to dry up and blow away, the utility of the folding bed, from this point of view, is to be questioned. Yet this pair of bookshelves, which saved the folding bed from utter hypocrisy, had their blessed uses, and could ill have been spared by the inhabitants of Hampton Court.

It has already been intimated that Miss Hetty did not belong to the privileged of

VOL. XXXIII--9

the earth, who calmly draw upon their bank accounts when a new carpet or any other luxury is in question. That she had riches laid up somewhere, no one acquaintcd with her patient, self-denying life could question, but they were not to be commanded at will by a check torn from a bank-book. To indulge in any unwonted expense not only meant that she must work harder for her small wage as a seamstress and enjoy less comfort, but that she must, for a time, forego the dearest privilege of her humble existence the power of lifting other's burdens. She would not have minded so much if it had not been for Robbie.

Robbie Ferguson and his father lived. second floor back. In San Francisco the second floor back may mean suites of sunny rooms looking out across the valley to the peaceful Mission hills, with perhaps a view of the Bay, sparkling in sunlight or shimmering in moonlight, beyond a forest of shipping. It may mean a succession of elegant apartments commanding a superb vista of the broad and beautiful channel, the rugged heights of the Marin shore, or a dazzling glimpse of the great sea shining beyond the Golden Gate. In Robbie Ferguson's case it meant only a little cheerless apartment in the rear of the house, shadowed by tall buildings that fronted on another street, and lighted by a single narrow window that inhaled the unpleasant odors ascending from other people's kitchens.

There had been a time, it was whispered throughout the house, when the Fergusons had been first floor front; but that was before the bank failed in which thrifty David Ferguson had deposited all his savings, before the foolish, weak young nother had gone astray, before the baby died, before Robbie, wayward and left to his own devices, had fallen off a heavy truck when enjoying a stolen ride, before the father, crushed by the weight of misfortune upon misfortune, had begun to drown memory in drink. With dogged Scotch persistence, David Ferguson went to work every Monday morning, labored heavily, stupidly, but faithfully, all the week, and with a persistency as dogged, on every Saturday night, having first punctiliously met his landlady's exactions, deliberately devoted that night and the next

day to squandering the remainder of his earnings.

Miss Hetty held fast to two convictions which she had never confided to any of her fellow-lodgers, and which none of them would have been likely to treat with any measure of respect. The one was that good surgical aid might bring Robbie's leg-the little, helpless, twisted limb-back into proper shape; the other was that David Ferguson might be reformed. To his neighbors Ferguson was as hopelessly degraded and besotten in character as his lad was maimed in body. Only this cheerful little optimist believed that if the father could see his boy sound and well again, with the promise of a happy, useful manhood, he might forget his disappointment and humiliation, and find his way back to his own self-respect and the esteem of his fellows.

Miss Hetty had never dared declare to herself that she would presume to step into this little human tragedy to enact the part of a Lady Bountiful who should bring healing to the child and reclaim the father; but she had studied up the records of similar surgical cases, she had ascertained the exact fee that a celebrated surgeon would probably ask, and when one day she counted up her carpet money and found that she had at last accumulated the needed sum, she was almost harsh to Robbie, who limped down the stairs and into her room for a book that she had promised him.

It was only natural that everybody in the house should take an interest in the new carpet, and that when the day for its purchase approached, Miss Hetty should be overwhelmed with well-meant advice. While her room could scarcely be considered the common gathering place of the house, as to throw open any apartment upon so liberal a plan would have been to introduce some undesirable elements, it had nevertheless, as time went by, become the center of the tangled web of life that the years wove in the crowded old tenement. Mrs. Smedley, the landlady, an austere dame of usually unbending mien, condescended to say that she hoped Miss Hetty would select a smart, stylish pattern. Mrs. Donovan, whose husband was head foreman in a foundry, and who had herself bought a new carpet six months

before, even went so far as to offer her services, as an expert by reason of this experience, in selecting the pattern; but Miss Hetty, who in passing the Donovan door had been dazzled by a glimpse of a gorgeous compound of gold and scarlet and purple and green, politely declined to tax Mrs. Donovan's time. The little Jewess who lived in the basement, with the kindly courage bred of poverty, told Miss Hetty, in confidence, of a second-hand store on Fourth Street where she might buy a tapestry but slightly worn and so bright and beautiful no one could ever tell it from Body Brussels, at less than onehalf the cost of new.

Susan O'Rafferty, whose worldly education was advanced so far beyond the others that she had begun to realize there were a few things she did not know, did not attempt to force upon her friend the doubtful benefits of her own judgment in this momentous case, but she offered a piece of counsel that fairly stopped the small woman's breath:

"If ye 'll take me advice," she said, "it's the minister I'd be askin' to make a chice for me."

It was not necessary for Miss O'Rafferty, who herself belonged to the church. militant, to explain to whom she referred in this instance. Miss Hetty belonged to a religious denomination entirely outside the beaten paths of orthodoxy or heterodoxy, a sect which perhaps loves and reveres The Book as few religious societies have ever done, but which expounds its teachings on a plane of high intellectual interpretation, materially differing from the ordinary reading of the Scriptures. I am not saying that it was not presumptuous in the highest degree for Miss Hetty, who it must be manifest was a person of small mental caliber, to enroll herself among this band of high philosophers. The presumption was even more reprehensible because it so happened that this especial congregation, even among those of its own creed, was regarded as extremely aristocratic and exclusive, being mainly composed of wealthy and high-bred people, who had had a chance for a healthy intellectual growth and could command the necessary leisure for philosophical thought. The fact remains that Miss Hetty when her simple Sabbath-morning duties were

over, and the bulk of the population of Hampton Court, returned from early mass, were betaking themselves to various congenial pleasures, dressed herself in her shabby best and demurely stole across the city, a veritable little religious snob, to drop unnoticed into one of the rear pews occupied by this very aristocratic congregation.

Upon one occasion, Susan O'Rafferty, possessed of more curiosity than zeal concerning Miss Hetty's religious proclivities, had asked the privilege of accompanying her, and although Miss O'Rafferty was never inclined to repeat the experience, it had been observable that she treated Miss Hetty with increased respect from that day. The beautiful interior of the church, its fastidious appointments, the rich attire of the congregation, the solemn ritual, the quiet elegance of the clergyman's vestments, his dignified bearing, and the gentle purity of his countenance, had impressed Miss Susan more than the doctrines he expounded.

"An' why wud n't you be askin' Mr. Richmond to pick out a pretty pattern for you?" she persevered. "Sure he's that foine in his tastes that whin Mis' Lorrance where I do be clanin' on a Friday this siven year, she be considerin' the buyin' av a picture to hang over the mantel in her drawin'-room, and Mr. Lorrance he thinks betther av the wan, an' the Missus she's taken wid the other, Mr. Lorrance do say, an' it's me own ears as heard it the while I was wipin' Jack Lorrance's dirty fingermarks aff the bookcase door with a bit of pneumonia in the water, an' Mr. Lorrance he says: Why don't ye be after askin' Mr. Richmond his opinion? It's the fcinest taste he has av anybody in all San Francisco, an' whativer he says I'll abide by it," says he. An' wid that they settles their differences, an' Mr. Richmond he picks out the paintin', and it's hangin' there this day."

"Oh, I could n't; I could n't!" replied Miss Hetty, shocked at the sugges

tion.

"Maybe it's only the rich people's priest he is," sniffed Susan.

Miss Hetty's cheeks flamed with indignation, and as quickly paled with resolve. The character of her beloved pastor was assailed. There was but one defense that

would have the least weight with Susan, and that was to prove by actual test, his readiness to serve rich and poor alike,

All people are egotists at heart, and the greater egotists are they who, recognizing their frailty, most sedulously conceal it. Miss Hetty, not being self-concentered, had learned neither her infirmity nor yet the high art of dissimulation. The more she thought about it, the more firmly was she convinced that her carpet was of quite as much consequence as other people's pictures.

Happily her pastor did not undertake to undeceive her. He courteously listened to her embarrassed request.

"A carpet-and for you, Miss Hetty?" he said. "I'll go with the greatest pleas

ure."

He pushed aside the papers on the desk before which he was sitting. 66 They can wait better than you," he remarked in answer to her protest.

As they walked together along the crowded streets, his face wore an expression of cheerful interest, as if the purchase were one of vital moment to him. To own the truth, he carried in his mind a very bright and shining picture of that pleasant room on the South Side, the one little oasis in a quarter where vice and poverty fought together for the possession of human souls. Only once did the small woman venture a timid apology:

"I did n't dare decide for myself. It would be such a dreadful thing to make a mistake."

"Indeed, the choosing of a carpet is a very serious thing," returned the clergyman with gravity. "There is so much to consider. You may select something that is very pretty in itself, and when you get it down on your floor you find that it is at war with all your belongings. And the worst of it is that you cannot turn it to the wall, as you might a picture, or disguise it with a piece of drapery, as you can an offending article of furniture. It is an obstinate, appalling reality, and you are obliged to live with it and face it all the time."

His companion gave him such a bright, confiding little smile of appreciation, that the minister went on.

"It would n't in the least surprise me if much of the crime in this world could be

traced, directly or indirectly, to the influence of carpets. The effect of a pleasant, congenial home upon growing generations is indisputable, and no one inanimate item is such an important factor in the home as the carpet. A glare of inharmonious colors is confusing to the brain. I have a suspicion that the notable increase in crime during the past decade is in some degree attributable to the solemn horrors, with black grounds, that people laid in their best rooms when the craze for artistic adornment came in with a flourish of swords and a blare of trumpets. I'll tell you a secret, Miss Hetty. I don't believe that in quiet harmony and a certain something that savors of home comfort, we have ever surpassed the rag carpets of our grandmothers when a discriminating eye directed the arrangement of colors."

But they were at the doors of a great carpet warehouse, where it would never do to let such heresy be heard; and while Miss Hetty was silently speculating as to whether Mr. Donovan or Jimmy would take to suicide or to arson, the urbane salesman ushered them upstairs into a long apartment lined with shelves banked with huge rolls, which the man proceeded to take down and display.

This was a trying moment for Miss Hetty. She was vaguely aware that dull colors and low tones were considered in keeping with the prevailing artistic sentiment of the day. She confidently expected that Mr. Richmond would commend a modest pattern in dull neutral tones, and she was schooling herself to bear it. To her own untutored eye there was still a sense of cheer in the bright reds and greens and browns of the ragged old three-ply. When the floor was covered with an assortment of olives and grays and browns, and the salesman paused, as if to ask their approval, she could not resist. casting an appealing look in the direction of the minister. To her relief, he was already returning a smiling negative to the shopman.

More rolls were lifted from the shelves and spread out until the floor became a ccnfusion of color and pattern, bright cclors and dull struggling for supremacy. Mr. Richmond at length stopped the man. "Let us have these two taken apart

from the rest and laid over by the window where we can compare them," he directed.

Two rolls were separated from the rest and spread out where the light from the tall windows fell full upon them. Miss Hetty could not repress a little cry of delight.

"Which shall it be?" asked the clergy

man.

One was a symphony in crimson, shading from the most vivid wine color to deepest maroon. The other was a pleasant harmony in golden browns, with a touch of dull peacock blue, shading to soft drab. The rich hues of the crimson carpet suggested the warm glow of winter evenings, when the children should gather in her room for a quiet half-hour; yet where was the rich furniture to come from, that should be in keeping with all this splendor?

"I don't know. They are both beautiful," she said gently.

"I think I should choose the brown," said Mr. Richmond meditatively. "It is n't as brilliant as the other, but you could no more tire of it than you could tire of looking at the seashore on a calm, sunny day, when the sun turns the sands to gold, and the rocks throw cool shadows on them, and the blue of the sky is reflected in every little tide-pool that the sea has left behind."

"I want it cut and matched, please. I will sew it and lay it myself," said Miss Hetty with quiet decision. "Here is the size of the room." She gave the man some figures. "How much will it take?" she added anxiously.

"Let me see. This pattern is n't going to waste much in cutting." The man unrolled another length and twisted the strips around, bringing them side by side. Then he pulled out a note-book and made a rapid calculation.

His customer knew the result before he announced it. She had observed him closely as he matched the pattern, noted the small waste, and modified certain estimates of her own in consequence. These calculations she had repeated again and again, assisted by Susan O'Rafferty, and the two women had agreed that one must expect, in such a large room, to allow a great deal for waste in matching. This