“Shut your head, madam, and there’ll be less,” was Sal’s ready rejoinder, as at the end of a verse she paused for breath.

The first Sabbath Mary looked on in perfect amazement, but the next one she spent in her own room, and after a deal of trouble, succeeded in coaxing Sal to stay there too, listening while she read to her from her little Bible.  But the reading was perplexing business, for Sal constantly corrected her pronunciation, or stopped her while she expounded Scripture, and at last in a fit of impatience Mary tossed the book into the crazy creature’s lap, asking her to read her self.

This was exactly what Sal wanted, and taking the foot of Mary’s bed for her rostrum, she read and preached so furiously, that Mary felt almost glad when Miss Grundy came up to stop the racket, and locked Sal in her own room.

CHAPTER VIII.

AT CHURCH.

The Sabbath following Mary’s first acquaintance with Jenny was the one on which she was to go to church.  Billy Bender promised that if his mother were not suffering from any new disease, he would come to stay with Alice, and in case he failed, the pleasant-looking woman was to take his place.  Mary would have preferred going alone, but Sally begged so hard, and promised so fairly “not to make a speck of a face at the preacher, provided he used good grammar,” that Mary finally asked Mr. Parker to let her go.

He consented willingly, saying he hoped the house would be peaceable for once.  And now, it was hard telling which looked forward to the next Sunday with the most impatience, Mary or Sal, the latter of whom was anxious to see the fashions, as she fancied her wardrobe was getting out of date.  To Mary’s happiness there was one drawback.  A few weeks before her mother’s death she had given to Ella her straw hat, which she had outgrown, and now the only bonnet she possessed was the veritable blue one of which George Moreland had made fun, and which by this time was nearly worn out.  Mrs. Campbell, who tried to do right and thought that she did, had noticed Mary’s absence from church, and once on speaking of the subject before Hannah, the latter suggested that probably she had no bonnet, saying that the one which she wore at her mother’s funeral was borrowed Mrs. Campbell immediately looked over her things, and selecting a straw which she herself had worn three years before, she tied a black ribbon across it, and sent it as a present to Mary.

The bonnet had been rather large for Mrs. Campbell, and was of course a world too big for Mary, whose face looked bit, as Sal expressed it, “like a yellow pippin stuck into the far end of a firkin.”  Miss Grundy, however, said “it was plenty good enough for a pauper,” reminding Mary that “beggars shouldn’t be choosers.”

“So it is good enough for paupers like you,” returned Sal, “but people who understand grammar always have a keen sense of the ridiculous.”