When Brown had first conceived this festival it had been with the idea of sending to the nearest city for a full equipment, if an inexpensive one, of all the china and glass, linen and silver necessary for the serving of the meal.  But upon thinking it over it occurred to him that such an outlay would not only arouse his new friends’ suspicion of his financial resources, it would deprive them of one of the chief joys in such a neighbourhood as this in which he was abiding—­that of the personal sharing in the details of the dinner’s preparation and the proud lending of their best in friendly rivalry.

Therefore the table, as it now stood before him in all but complete readiness for the feast, bore such witness to the warmth of esteem in which the neighbourhood held him, not to mention its resourcefulness in fitting together adjuncts not originally intended for partnership, as must have touched the heart of a dinner-giver less comprehending than Donald Brown, late of St. Timothy’s great and prosperous parish.

To begin with, the table itself had been set up in its place in the front room by Tim Lukens the carpenter, who when he was sober was one of the cleverest of artisans.  Starting with two pairs of sawhorses and continuing with smooth pine boards, he had constructed a table of goodly proportions and of a solidity calculated to withstand successfully the demand likely to be made upon it.  Over this table-top Mrs. Kelcey had laid—­without thought, it must be admitted, of any intermediary padding such as certain mistaken hostesses consider essential—­three freshly and painstakingly laundered tablecloths, her own, Mrs. Murdison’s, and Mrs. Lukens’s best, cunningly united by stitches hardly discoverable except by a too-searching eye.

The foundations thus laid, the setting of the table had been a delightful task for Mrs. Kelcey, assisted as she was by Mrs. Murdison, who frequently differed from her in points of arrangement but who yielded most of them upon hearing, as she frequently did, Mrs. Kelcey’s verbal badge of office:  “Misther Brown put me in charge, Missus Murdison.  He says to me, he says, ‘Missus Kelcey, do jist as ye think best.’” Together the two had achieved a triumph, and the table now stood forth glowingly ready for its sixteen guests, from the splendid bunch of scarlet geraniums in an immense pink and blue bowl with an Indian’s head on one side, to the sixteen chairs, no two exactly alike, which had been obtained from half as many houses.

As for the dinner itself, there was no patchwork about that.  Brown himself had supplied the essentials, trusting that the most of his guests could have no notion whatever of the excessively high cost of turkeys that season, or of the price of the especial quality of butter and eggs which he handed over to Mrs. Kelcey to be used in the preparation of the dishes which he and she had decided upon.  That lady, however, had had some compunctions as she saw the unstinted array of materials an astonished grocer’s boy had delivered upon her kitchen table two days before the dinner, and had expressed herself to Mrs. Murdison as concerned lest Mr. Brown had spent more than he could well afford.