r kitchen was a sitting room, and when the supper had been
cleared away and the red cotton spread covered the table, Ellen asked
her husband to bring in the little tree. She found a cracker box,
handily cut a hole with a cooking knife, and set up the little tree by
the kitchen window.

"What under the canopy--" said her mother, her voice cracking.

"Oh, something to do in the evening," Ellen answered. "Father's going to
pop me some corn to trim it with; aren't you, father? Mother, why don't
you get you a good big darning needle and string what he pops?"

"It'll make a lot of litter," said her mother, but she brought the
needle, for something to do.

"Hey, king and country," said her father; "I'd ought to have somebody
here to shell it for me."

"Who you trimming up a tree for?" her mother demanded; "I thought they
wasn't to be any in town this year."

"It ain't Christmas yet," Ellen said only. "I guess it won't do any hurt
two days before."

While the two worked, Ellen went to the cupboard drawer, and from behind
her pile of kitchen towels she drew out certain things: walnuts, wrapped
in shining yeast tinsel and dangling from red yarn; wishbones tied with
strips of bright cloth; a tiny box, made like a house, with rudely cut
doors and windows; eggshells penciled as faces; a handful of peanut
owls; a glass-stoppered bottle; a long necklace of buttonhole twist
spools. A certain blue paper soldier doll that she had made was
upstairs, but the other things she brought and fastened to the tree.

Her husband smoked and uneasily watched her. He saw somewhat within her
plan, but he was not at home there. "If the boy _had_ lived and _had_
been up-chamber asleep now," he thought once, "it'd be something like,
to go trimming up a tree. But _this_ way--"

"What you leaving the whole front of the tree bare for?" her mother
asked.

"The blue paper soldier goes there. I want it should see the blue paper
soldier first thing...." Ellen said, and stopped abruptly.

"You talk like you was trimming the tree for somebody," her mother
observed, aggrieved.

"Maybe something might look in the window--going by," Ellen said.

"Get in there! Get your heads in there, ye beggars!" said the old man to
the popcorn. "I'd ought to have somebody here to pick up them shooting
kernels," he complained.

In a little while, with flat-footed stamping, Ben Helders came in. When
he had the pattern number, by laborious copying against the wall un