But still the beauty and brilliancy of the leaping flames were not
altogether lost upon an unseeing world, for there was another present
beside Susan, and that other was full to overflowing with the power of
silent admiration. Her little black beady eyes stared at the dancing
lights that leapt from each burning log in a species of rapt
absorption, and it was only semi-occasionally that she turned them
back upon the work which lay upon her lap. Mrs. Lathrop (for of course
it was Mrs. Lathrop) was matching scraps for a "crazy" sofa-pillow,
and there was something as touchingly characteristic in the calmness
and deliberation of her matching as there was in the wild whirl which
Susan's stocking received whenever that lady felt the moment had come
to alter her needles. For Susan, when she knit, knit fast and
furiously, whereas Mrs. Lathrop's main joy in relation to labor lay in
the sensation that she was preparing to undertake it. The sofa-pillow
had been conceived--some eighteen months before--as a crazy-quilt, but
all of us who have entertained such friends unawares know that the
size of their quilts depended wholly upon the wealth of our
scrap-bags, and in the case of Mrs.
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