aspect most dreadful to the poor, and upon which the brothers and sisters of penury who by hook or by crook contrive to keep up appearances for the nonce have no mercy.  “Today,” she thought, “callers will delight me not, nor customers neither.”  But Miss Wimple was in a peculiarly provoking predicament, and for such there is ever a malignant star;—­callers and customers dropped in, one after another, all day, as they had rarely come before,—­as though, indeed, her most spiteful enemy had got wind of the petticoat affair, and sent them to plague her.

That day, Miss Wimple had recourse to as much painfully ingenious dodging behind the low counters as though she had a cloven foot to hide.  When evening came, she could have sat down—­if she had been any other plagued woman in the world but Sally Wimple—­and had a good cry.  It was bitter weather, and she had shivered much;—­she did not mind that; but to look poverty-stricken!  No, she did not cry outside, but it was a narrow escape.  In her trouble, her eyes wandered around the shop beseechingly; and lo! she beheld in the window a timely hooped skirt,—­a daring speculation wherein she had lately invested, in consideration of the growing importance of her millinery department; and straightway Miss Wimple went and took the hoop, and offered it up for a pride-offering in the stead of her delicacy, that was so dear to her.  It was a thing of touching artlessness to do; only so cunning-simple a soul as Sally Wimple could ever have thought of it.  She sat up late that night, engaged in compromising with her prejudices, by drawing out the whalebones, one by one, from the “Alboni,” shaving them down with a piece of glass, very thin, and tucking them,—­until all their loud defiance was subdued, and for Miss Wimple’s Hoop it might be tenderly deprecated that it was nothing to speak of, “such a leetle one.”

The sacrifice was made, and, let us hope, not merely figuratively accepted by Him to whom prejudices may arise today an offering not less honored than was the blood of rams in the hour when Abraham laid his first-born on an altar in the thicket of Jehovah-jireh.

If any challenge the probabilities of this incident, and cavil at the chance that Miss Wimple’s necessity could, under any circumstances, bring forth such an invention, I hope I have only to remind them that that brave angel had become straitened to a point whereat she had neither material from which to erect another quilted petticoat, nor the means of procuring it, even if she could spare the time necessary to the making of one,—­which she could not, being now closely occupied between the engagements of her hired needle and the newly-found cares that Charity had imposed upon her.

But, however the probabilities may appear, Miss Wimple’s Hoop was a shaved-whalebone fact; and the quilted petticoat would never have been missed, but for the officious scrutiny of the eyes, and the provoking prating of the tongues, of a sophisticated few who marvelled greatly at the pliancy and the “perfect set” of Miss Wimple’s Alboni,—­“and that demure little prig, too! who’d have thought it?”