d added that it "didn't
look as if there would be much of any Christmas down to the station to
meet them." On which Mis' Mortimer Bates had spoken out, philosophical
to the point of brutality. Mis' Bates was little and brown and quick,
and her clothes seemed always to curtain her off, so that her figure
was no part of her presence.

"I ain't going to do a thing for Christmas this year," she declared, as
nearly everybody in the village had intermittently declared, "not a
living, breathing thing. I can't, and folks might just as well know it,
flat foot. What's the use of buying tinsel and flim-flam when you're
eating milk gravy to save butter and using salt sacks for handkerchiefs?
I ain't educated up to see it."

Mis' Jane Moran, who had changed her chair three times to avoid a
draught, sat down carefully in her fourth chair, her face twitching a
little as if its muscles were connected with her joints.

"Christmas won't be no different from any other day to our house this
year," she said. "We'll get up and eat our three meals and sit down and
look at each other. We can't even spare a hen--she might lay if we
didn't eat her."

Mis' Abby Winslow, mother of seven under fifteen, looked up from her
rocking-chair--Mis' Winslow always sat limp in chairs as if they were
reaching out to rest her and, indeed, this occasional yielding to the
force of gravity was almost her only luxury.

"You ain't thinking of the children, Mis' Bates," she said, "nor you
either, Jane Moran, or you couldn't talk that way. We can't have no real
Christmas, of course. But I'd planned some little things made out of
what I had in the house: things that wouldn't be anything, and yet would
seem a little something."

Mis' Mortimer Bates swept round at her.

"Children," she said, "ought to be showed how to do without things.
Bennet and Gussie ain't expecting a sliver of nothing for Christmas--not
a sliver."

Mis' Winslow unexpectedly flared up.

"Whether it shows through on the outside or not," she said, "I'll bet
you they are."

"My three," Mis' Emerson Morse put in pacifically, "have been kept from
popping corn and cracking nuts all Fall so's they could do both
Christmas night, and it would seem like something that _was_ something."

"That ain't the idea," Mis' Bates insisted; "I want them learnt to do
without--" ("They'll learn that," Mis' Abby Winslow said; "they'll
learn....") "Happening as it does to most every one of us not to have no
C