It could not have been more than two or three days later, when, as I passed, I perceived that she had already increased her stock of gardeners.  Half a dozen young men were working with a will.  She had half of the minister’s Bible-class engaged.  Two of them had brought a load of gravel from down under the hill as you go to the Mill village.  They were shoveling this out at the front gate, while some others were spreading it in a broad walk up to the church-door.  A great pile of sods lay right by the side of the growing gravel-heap.  Deacon Goodsole, in his shirt sleeves, was raking over the ground preparing it for grass-seed.  “Rather late for grass-seed,” he had remonstrated, but the inexorable Miss Moore had replied, “Better late than never.”  Four or five of the boys, who had used the church common as a ball-ground, were enlisted-a capital stroke of policy that.  Among them was Bill Styles, who prides himself on throwing a stone higher and with surer aim than any other boy in Wheathedge, and had demonstrated it by stoning all the glass out of the tower windows.  A melancholy-looking cow, transfixed with astonishment, had stopped in the middle of the road to look with bewilderment upon their invasion of its ancient territory.  I leaned for a moment on the tottering fence and looked, equally bewildered, on the busy scene.

But Miss Moore never suffers any one to look on idly where she is laboring.  “Ah!  Mr. Laicus,” said she, cheerily, “you are just the man we want.  That cow will come in through these gaps in the fence and undo our work in an hour after we leave it.  I wish you would get hold of somebody and fix it up.”  With that she was off again, and I was in for an office.

Deacon Goodsole afterwards told me confidentially that he was caught in the same way.

Now, though I am no gardener, I am a bit of a carpenter.  So, after taking the dimensions of the fence, mentally, I started off for the material, which Mr. Hardcap gave, and, with the aid of a volunteer or two, I succeeded in so far filling the breach that the melancholy cow gave up her little game, and walked philosophically away.

To make a long story short, the result of Miss Moore’s energetic endeavors was seen the next Sabbath, in part, in an entirely new aspect of affairs, which has been constantly improving since.  The board of trustees, moved thereto partly by the energies of Miss Moore, partly by those of their Baptist neighbors who have just got into a new church, have commenced to build a new fence.  A graveled walk, free from dust in drought and from mud in rainy weather, leads up to the church-door.  A border of sod on either side melts gradually away into the beginning of a lawn of grass which will be fuller and better next year than this.  On a couple of fan shaped lattices, in which I take a little pride as my own handiwork, a honey-suckle on one side of the church-door and a prairie rose on the other are planted.  In imagination