"I think you are getting into business!" exclaimed Mrs. Ashford. "It is certainly very good of you to take all that trouble. And I should imagine it is not the most comfortable place in the world in which to give sewing or any other kind of lessons. Now Mrs. Scott is different. Her room is always as neat as a pin." "Oh, yes!" cried Miss Alice, "that reminds me there's more to my story. These sewing lessons are actually making Mrs. Torrence cleaner and more tidy. The first day I went the table was all cluttered up, and when she cleaned it off for me to cut out on she looked rather ashamed of its dinginess, and muttered some excuse as she wiped it over with an old cloth. The next day that table looked as if she had been scrubbing it all night--it was so startlingly clean. She had scrubbed a chair, too, for me to sit on. Then I suppose she thought the clean table and chair put the rest of the room out of countenance, for on my next visit I found the floor had been scrubbed and the windows washed. When I told mother about it she said the woman should be encouraged, and sent her that striped rug that used to be in our dining-room, you remember. It was to spread down before the stove. The result of that was the old stove has been polished up within an inch of its life. Yesterday I took to the children those gay pictures that came last Christmas with the Graphic, and tacked them on to the wall. Now the next time I go I expect to see the walls scoured or whitewashed or something," and Miss Alice finished with a laugh. "If you keep on you will work quite a change in their way of living," said Mrs. Ashford. "There's plenty of room yet for improvement," replied her cousin; "for although it must be pretty hard for such a large family to live in such a small space and be cleanly, still they might try to be." "I should think the narrow space would be bad enough without the dirt." "Well, things have been and are yet pretty forlorn. But I am glad I have been able to effect a little change for the better." "But you said I got you into it," said Marty, "and I don't see what I have to do with it, nor what mission work has either." "I should have told you that one reason I thought of offering this help to Mrs. Torrence is that it may perhaps give me an opportunity to say something to her on religious subjects. She takes no interest in such matters, never goes to church, and only allows her children to go to Sunday-school for what people give them. The Bible-reader of that district tells me that Mrs. Torrence wont listen to her, wont let her go into the room. She is a sullen, ill-natured kind of woman--I mean Mrs. Torrence--and hard to get at. So I thought I might possibly get at her in this way, and your account of missionary ladies going to zenanas to teach fancy-work in order to get a chance to tell the women of God and the Bible, put it into my head that I might try something of the same kind."