“There, Tom, how’s that?  Does it droop as much as the one on the other side?”

Tom Kelcey, aged fourteen, squinted critically at the long festoon of ground-pine between the centre of the chimney-breast and the angle of the dingy old oak-beamed ceiling.

“Drop her a couple of inches, Misther Brown,” he suggested.  “No, not so much.  There, that’s the shtuff.  Now you’ve got her, foine and dandy.”

Brown stepped down from the chair on which he had been standing, and stood off with Tom to view the effect.

“Yes, that’s exactly right,” said he, “thanks to your good eye.  The room looks pretty well, eh?  Quite like having a dinner party.”

“It’s ilegant, Misther Brown, that’s what it is,” said a voice in the doorway behind them.  “Tom bhoy, be afther takin’ the chair back to the kitchen for him.”

Mrs. Kelcey, mother of Tom, and next-door neighbour to Brown, advanced into the room.  She was laden with a big basket, which Brown, perceiving, immediately took from her.

“Set it down careful, man,” said she.  “The crust on thim pies is that delicate it won’t bear joltin’.  I had the saints’ own luck with ’em this toime, praise be.”

“That’s great,” said Brown.  “But I haven’t worried about that.  You never have anything else, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Kelcey shook her head in delighted protest.

“The table is jist the handsomest I iver laid eyes on,” she asserted, modestly changing the subject.

“It is pretty nice, isn’t it?” agreed Brown warmly, surveying the table with mixed emotions.  When he stopped to think of what Mrs. Hugh Breckenridge would say at sight of that table, set for the Thanksgiving dinner her brother, Donald Brown, was giving that afternoon, he experienced a peculiar sensation in the region of his throat.  He was possessed of a vivid sense of humour which at times embarrassed him sorely.  If it had not been that his bigness of heart kept his love of fun in order he would have had great difficulty, now and then, in comporting himself with necessary gravity.

Mrs. Kelcey herself had arranged that table, spending almost the entire preceding day in dashing about the neighbourhood, borrowing from Brown’s neighbours the requisite articles.  Brown’s own stock of blue-and-white ware proving entirely inadequate, besides being in Mrs. Kelcey’s eyes by no means fine enough for the occasion, she had unhesitatingly requisitioned every piece of china she could lay hands on in the neighbourhood.  She had had no difficulty whatever in borrowing more than enough, for every woman in the block who knew Brown was eager to lend her best.  The result was such an array of brilliantly flowered plates and cups and dishes of every style and shape, that one’s gaze, once riveted thereon, could with difficulty be removed.