“What is it for?” Comfort asked sometimes when she gazed at it shining in its pink cotton bed in the top of the work-box.

“It’s to keep,” answered her mother.

Comfort grew to have a feeling, which she never expressed to anybody, that her gold dollar was somehow like Esau’s birthright, and something dreadful would happen to her if she parted with it.  She felt safer, because a “mess of pottage” didn’t sound attractive to her, and she did not think she would ever be tempted to spend her gold dollar for that.

Comfort went to school when she was ten years old.  She had not begun as early as most of the other girls, because she lived three quarters of a mile from the school-house and had many sore throats.  The doctors had advised her mother to teach her at home; and she could do that, because she had been a teacher herself when she was a girl.

Comfort had not been to school one day before everybody in it knew about her gold ring and her dollar, and it happened in this way:  She sat on the bench between Rosy and Matilda Stebbins, and Rosy had a ring on the middle finger of her left hand.  Rosy was a fair, pretty little girl, with long light curls, which all the other girls admired and begged for the privilege of twisting.  Rosy at recess usually had one or two of her friends standing at her back twisting her soft curls over their fingers.

Rosy wore pretty gowns and aprons, too, and she was always glancing down to see if her skirt was spread out nicely when she sat on the bench.  Her sister Matilda had just as pretty gowns, but she was not pretty herself.  However, she was a better scholar, although she was a year younger.  That day she kept glancing across Comfort at her sister, and her black eyes twinkled angrily.  Rosy sometimes sat with her left hand pressed affectedly against her pink cheek, with the ring-finger bent slightly outward; and then she held up her spelling-book before her with her left hand, and the same ostentatious finger.

Finally Matilda lost her patience, and she whispered across Comfort Pease.  “You act like a ninny,” said she to Rosy, with a fierce pucker of her red lips and a twinkle of her black eyes.

Rosy looked at her, and the pink spread softly all over her face and neck; but she still held her spelling-book high, and the middle finger with the ring wiggled at the back of it.

“It ain’t anything but brass, neither,” whispered Matilda.

“It ain’t,” Rosy whispered back.

“Smell of it.”

Rosy crooked her arm around her face and began to cry.  However, she cried quite easily, and everybody was accustomed to seeing her fair head bent over the hollow of her arm several times a day, so she created no excitement at all.  Even the school-teacher simply glanced at her and said nothing.  The school-teacher was an elderly woman who had taught school ever since she was sixteen.  She was called very strict, and the little girls were all afraid of her.  She