“Everything. We must start this minute, Leah Bloodgood! The house must be aired and painted and papered, and window-glass set--there's no end! And all in four days! We can't let our minister bring his wife and five children home to a shabby house. Cornelia Opp must go round and get money for new dining-room chairs, and there ought to be more beds with a family like that. Dishes, too. Cornelia ought to start at _once_. She's the best solicitor we have.” “There's another thing,” broke out Mrs. Bloodgood; “the minister must have some new shirts. He ought to have a whole trousseau. He hasn't boarded with me, and I done all his mending, without my knowing what he ought to have, now that he's going to go and get married. We can't let _him_ be shabby, either.” “Then, of course, there ought to be a lot of cooked food in the house, and supper all ready for them when they come. Oh, I guess we'll find plenty to do! I guess we can't stop to groan much. But, oh, how different we'd all feel if it was Cornelia!” “Different! I'd give 'em my dining-room chairs and my cellar stairs! I'd make shirts and sit up all night to cook! It's--it's wicked, Marilla, that's what it is.” “I know _it_ is, but he isn't,” championed Marilla. “He's just a good man gone wrong. It's his guardian angel that's to blame--a guardian angel has no business to be napping.” At best, it was pretty late in the day to overhaul a parsonage that had been closed so long and sinking gently into mild decay. The little parish woke with a dismayed start and went to work, to a woman. Operations were begun within an amazingly brief time; cleaners and repairers were hurried to the parsonage, and the women of the parish were told off into relays to assist them. “Somebody go to Mrs. Higginbotham Taylor's and get a high chair,” directed Marilla Merritt. “I'll lend my tea-chair for the next-to-the-baby, anyway, till they can get something better. We don't want our minister's children sitting round on dictionaries and encyclopaedias.” The minister had come to them, a lone bachelor, with kind, absent eyes and the faculty of making himself beloved. For six years they had taken care of him and loved him--watched over his outgoings and his incomings and forgiven all his absent-mindednesses. They had picked out Cornelia Opp for him, and added it to their prayers like an earnest codicil--“O Lord, bring Cornelia Opp and the minister together. Amen.” Cornelia Opp herself lived on her sweet, unselfish, single life, and prayed, “Lord, bless the minister,” unsuspectingly. She was as much beloved among them all as the minister. They were proud of her slender, beautiful figure and her serene face, and of her many capabilities. What the minister lacked, Cornelia had; Cornelia lacked nothing.