A year went by and a quarter of the quilt was finished, a second year passed and half was done.  The third year Mehetabel had pneumonia and lay ill for weeks and weeks, overcome with terror lest she die before her work was completed.  A fourth year and one could really see the grandeur of the whole design; and in September of the fifth year, the entire family watching her with eager and admiring eyes, Mehetabel quilted the last stitches in her creation.  The girls held it up by the four corners, and they all looked at it in a solemn silence.  Then Mr. Elwell smote one horny hand within the other and exclaimed:  “By ginger!  That’s goin’ to the county fair!”

Mehetabel blushed a deep red at this.  It was a thought which had occurred to her in a bold moment, but she had not dared to entertain it.  The family acclaimed the idea, and one of the boys was forthwith dispatched to the house of the neighbor who was chairman of the committee for their village.  He returned with radiant face, “Of course he’ll take it.  Like’s not it may git a prize, so he says; but he’s got to have it right off, because all the things are goin’ to-morrow morning.”

Even in her swelling pride Mehetabel felt a pang of separation as the bulky package was carried out of the house.  As the days went on she felt absolutely lost without her work.  For years it had been her one preoccupation, and she could not bear even to look at the little stand, now quite bare of the litter of scraps which had lain on it so long.  One of the neighbors, who took the long journey to the fair, reported that the quilt was hung in a place of honor in a glass case in “Agricultural Hall.”  But that meant little to Mehetabel’s utter ignorance of all that lay outside of her brother’s home.  The family noticed the old woman’s depression, and one day Sophia said kindly, “You feel sort o’ lost without the quilt, don’t you, Mehetabel?”

“They took it away so quick!” she said wistfully; “I hadn’t hardly had one real good look at it myself.”

Mr. Elwell made no comment, but a day or two later he asked his sister how early she could get up in the morning.

“I dun’no’.  Why?” she asked.

“Well, Thomas Ralston has got to drive clear to West Oldton to see a lawyer there, and that is four miles beyond the fair.  He says if you can git up so’s to leave here at four in the morning he’ll drive you over to the fair, leave you there for the day, and bring you back again at night.”

Mehetabel looked at him with incredulity.  It was as though someone had offered her a ride in a golden chariot up to the gates of heaven.  “Why, you can’t mean it!” she cried, paling with the intensity of her emotion.  Her brother laughed a little uneasily.  Even to his careless indifference this joy was a revelation of the narrowness of her life in his home.  “Oh, ’tain’t so much to go to the fair.  Yes, I mean it.  Go git your things ready, for he wants to start to-morrow morning.”