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CHAPTER XXVII

NESSIE SUTTON'S tinkle at the Biggers's doorbell aroused Mrs. Roxie Biggers from her supper table where she sat eating with a sort of absent-minded voracity. As the good woman ate she revolved in her mind a fine stroke of charity. Now, at the ring of her bell, she arose from the table and started for the door still thinking over a detail of her plan. She was planning how she could get fifteen dollars and forty-three cents to buy a minister's Bible from a mail-order house to give to Mr. Tug Beavers.

But her charity did not stop there. Mrs. Biggers had conceived nothing less than the splendid accomplishment of sending Tug to a theological school and making a preacher of him. The thought warmed the old woman's heart with its glory.

The details of her plan and the glory she would receive mixed in her mind in a curious jumble! She now had twenty dollars and sixty-five cents in the Willing Workers’ fund—every lost soul the future Reverend Beavers might succeed in winning to Christ would in reality be her work—with ice-cream suppers during the summer and chicken dinners during the winter, she could rely upon about thirteen dollars a month the year round—the people of Irontown would have to acknowledge she was a power for goodness after such a coup as this—the dues of the Willing Workers were eight dollars and a half a month—when she got to Heaven the stars in her crown, she supposed, would equal the sum of her own charities plus those the Reverend Tug Beavers might perform—she could count on about eight dollars from the Woman's Bazaar; then school entertainments . . . here she opened her door.

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