When the neat and modest little mistress of the Hendrik Athenæum and Circulating Library descended to open the shop and take down the bars, all her sense of delicacy was shocked, and she was brought to shame; for her meek skirts, missing the generous support of the quilted silk petticoat, clung about her mortified extremities in thin and limp dejection. It was plain to Miss Wimple that she looked poverty-stricken,--an aspect most dreadful to the poor, and upon which the brothers and sisters of penury who by hook or by crook contrive to keep up appearances for the nonce have no mercy. "Today," she thought, "callers will delight me not, nor customers neither." But Miss Wimple was in a peculiarly provoking predicament, and for such there is ever a malignant star;--callers and customers dropped in, one after another, all day, as they had rarely come before,--as though, indeed, her most spiteful enemy had got wind of the petticoat affair, and sent them to plague her. That day, Miss Wimple had recourse to as much painfully ingenious dodging behind the low counters as though she had a cloven foot to hide. When evening came, she could have sat down--if she had been any other plagued woman in the world but Sally Wimple--and had a good cry. It was bitter weather, and she had shivered much;--she did not mind that; but to look poverty-stricken! No, she did not cry _outside_, but it was a narrow escape. In her trouble, her eyes wandered around the shop beseechingly; and lo! she beheld in the window a timely hooped skirt,--a daring speculation wherein she had lately invested, in consideration of the growing importance of her millinery department; and straightway Miss Wimple went and took the hoop, and offered it up for a pride-offering in the stead of her delicacy, that was so dear to her. It was a thing of touching artlessness to do; only so cunning-simple a soul as Sally Wimple could ever have thought of it. She sat up late that night, engaged in compromising with her prejudices, by drawing out the whalebones, one by one, from the "Alboni," shaving them down with a piece of glass, very thin, and tucking them,--until all their loud defiance was subdued, and for Miss Wimple's Hoop it might be tenderly deprecated that it was nothing to speak of, "such a _leetle_ one." The sacrifice was made, and, let us hope, not merely figuratively accepted by Him to whom _prejudices_ may arise today an offering not less honored than was the blood of rams in the hour when Abraham laid his first-born on an altar in the thicket of Jehovah-jireh.