making.

"Coming to the meeting, Mary?" Simeon asked as they passed her.

"No," said Mary Chavah, "I started for it. But it's such a nice night
I'm going to walk around."

"Things are going to go your way to that meeting, I guess," said Simeon;
"ain't you always found fault with Christmas?"

"They's a lot o' nonsense about it," Mary assented; "I don't ever bother
myself much with it. Why?"

"I donno but we'll all come round to your way of thinking to-night,"
said Simeon.

"For just this year!" Abel Ames called back, as they went on.

"You can't do much else, I guess," said Mary. "Everybody dips Christmas
up out of their pocketbooks, and if there ain't nothing there, they
can't dip."

The men laughed with her, and went on down the long street toward the
town. Mary followed slowly, under the yellowing elms that made great
golden shades for the dim post lamps. And high at the far end of the
street down which they went, hung the blue arc light before the Town
Hall, center to the constellation of the home lights and the shop lights
and the street lights, all near neighbours to the stream and sweep of
the stars hanging a little higher and shining as by one sun.

III

It was interesting to see how they took the proposal to drop that
Christmas from the calendar there in Old Trail Town. It was so eminently
a sensible thing to do, and they all knew it. Oh, every way they looked
at it, it was sensible, and they admitted it. Yet, besides Mary Chavah
and Ebenezer Rule, probably the only person in the town whose
satisfaction in the project could be counted on to be unfeigned was
little Tab Winslow. For Tab, as all the town knew, had a turkey brought
up by his own hand to be the Winslows' Christmas dinner, but such had
become Tab's intimacy with and fondness for the turkey that he was
prepared to forego his Christmas if only that dinner were foregone,
too.

"Theophilus Thistledown is such a human turkey," Tab had been heard
explaining patiently; "he knows me--and he knows his name. He don't
_expect_ us to eat him ... why, you _can't_ eat anything that knows its
name."

But every one else was just merely sensible. And they had been
discussing Christmas in this sensible strain at the town meeting that
night, before Simeon and Abel broached their plan for standardizing
their sensible leanings.

Somebody had said that Jenny Wing, and Bruce Rule, who was Ebenezer's
nephew, were expected home for Christmas, and ha