Up to this time she had lived in perfect satisfaction on seven hundred dollars a year, but now she began to feel straitened.  She no longer dared afford even the tiniest expenditure for her garden.  She spaded the beds herself, drew leaf mold from the woods in repeated trips with a child’s express wagon, and cut the poles for her sweet-peas with her own hands.  When Miss Molly Leonard declared herself on the verge of starvation from lack of sewing to do, and threatened to move to Johnsonville to be near her sister Annie, Miss Abigail gave up her “help” and paid Miss Molly for the time spent in the empty reading-room of the library.  But the campaign soon called for more than economy, even the most rigid.  When the minister had a call elsewhere, and the trustees of the church seized the opportunity to declare it impossible to appoint his successor, Miss Abigail sold her woodlot and arranged through the Home Missionary Board for someone to hold services at least once a fortnight.  Later the “big meadow” so long coveted by a New York family as a building site was sacrificed to fill the empty war chest, and, temporarily in funds, she hired a boy to drive her about the country drumming up a congregation.

Christmas time was the hardest for her.  The traditions of old Greenford were for much decorating of the church with ropes of hemlock, and a huge Christmas tree in the Town Hall with presents for the best of the Sunday-school scholars.  Winding the ropes had been, of old, work for the young unmarried people, laughing and flirting cheerfully.  By the promise of a hot supper, which she furnished herself, Miss Abigail succeeded in getting a few stragglers from the back hills, but the number grew steadily smaller year by year.  She and Miss Molly always trimmed the Christmas tree themselves.  Indeed, it soon became a struggle to pick out any child a regular enough attendant at Sunday-school to be eligible for a present.  The time came when Miss Abigail found it difficult to secure any children at all for the annual Christmas party.

The school authorities began to murmur at keeping up the large old schoolhouse for a handful of pupils.  Miss Abigail, at her wit’s end, guaranteed the fuel for warming the house, and half the pay of a teacher.  Examining, after this, her shrunk and meager resources, she discovered she had promised far beyond her means.  She was then seventy-three years old, but an ageless valor sprang up in her to meet the new emergency.  She focused her acumen to the burning point and saw that the only way out of her situation was to earn some money—­an impossible thing at her age.  Without an instant’s pause, “How shall I do it?” she asked herself, and sat frowning into space for a long time.