Now of course Mrs. Budlong did not get all those presents without giving presents. Not in Carthage! It might have been possible to bamboozle these people one Christmas, but never another. Mrs. Budlong gave heaps of presents. Christmas was an industry with her, an ambition; Christmas was her career. It had long ago lost its religious significance for her, as for nearly everybody else in Carthage. Even Mr. Frankenstein (the Pantatorium magnate) is one of the most ardent advertisers of Christmas bargains, while Isidore Strouther and Esau Streckfuss are "almost persuaded" every December. They might be entirely persuaded if it were not for the scenes they witness in their aisles during the last weeks of Yuletide and the aftermath of trying to collect from the Gentile husbands during Billtide. Mrs. Budlong's Christmas presents were of two sorts: those she made herself and those she made her husband pay for. He was the typical husband who never fails to settle his wife's bills, so long as he may raise a row about them till his wife cries and looks like an expensive luxury which only a really successful man could afford. Then he subsides until the first of the next month. II CHRONICLES OF A CRAFTSMAN Mrs. Budlong's campaign was undertaken with the same farsightedness as a magazine editor's. On or about the Fourth of July she began to worry and plan. By the second week in August she had her tatting well under way. By the middle of September she was getting in her embroidered doilies. The earliest frost rarely surprised her with her quilts untufted. And when the first snow flew, her sachet bags were all stuffed and smelly. She was very feminine in her sense of the value of her own time. At missionary meetings she would shed tears over the pathetic pictures of Oriental women who spent a year weaving a rug which would sell for a paltry hundred dollars and last a mere century or two. Then she would cheerfully devote fifteen days of incessant stitching at something she carried round in a sort of drumhead. At the end of that time she would have completed a more or less intolerable piece of colored fabric which she called a "drape" or a "throw." It could not be duplicated at a shop for less than $1.75, and it would wash perhaps three times. Mr. Budlong once figured that if sweat-shop proprietors paid wages at the scale Mrs. Budlong established for herself, all the seamstresses and seamsters would curl up round their machines and die of starvation the first week. But he never told Mrs. Budlong this. Fancy stitching did not earn much, but it did not cost much; and it kept her mysteriously contented. She was stitching herself to her own home all the time.