tions, it
seemed--and John Fairmeadow maintained it--which the great world
provided in the forests.

Pattie Batch might have been aware of this--the log shack was on the
edge of town--had not the window-panes been coated thick with Christmas
frost. She might have heard rough laughter passing by--the Bottle River
trail ran right past the door--had not the big Christmas wind snored in
the stove, and fearsomely rattled the door, and shaken the cabin, and
swept howling on. But she never in the world would have attended. Not in
that emergency! She would not, for anything, have peeped out of the
windows, in perfectly proper curiosity, to watch the Bottle River jacks
flounder into town. Not she! Pattie Batch was busy. Pattie Batch was so
desperately employed that her swift little fingers demanded all the
attention that the most alert, the brightest, the very most bewitching
gray eyes in the whole wide world could bestow upon anything whatsoever.
Christmas Eve, you see: Day done. Something of soft fawn-skin engaged
her, it seemed, with white patches matched and arranged with marvellous
exactitude: something made for warmth in the wind--something of small
fashion, but long and indubitably capacious--something with a hood. A
little cloak, possibly: I don't know. But I am sure that it could
envelop, that it could boil or roast, that it could fairly smother--a
baby! It was lined with golden-brown, crackling silk, which Pattie
Batch's mother had left in her trunk, upon her last departure, poor
woman! from the sordid world of Swamp's End to regions which were now
become in Pattie Batch's loving vision Places of Light. And it was upon
this treasured cloth that Pattie Batch's flashing needle was working
like mad in the lamplight. A Christmas sacrifice: it was labour of love
and the gift of treasure.

Pattie Batch was lovely. Everybody knew it; and there's no denying it.
Grief had not left her wan and apathetic. She had been "a little man."
She had been so much of a little man that she was now much more of a
little woman than ever she had been before. In respect to her bewitching
endearments, there's no mincing matters, at all. It would shame a man to
'hem and haw and qualify. She was adorable. Beauty of youth and heart of
tenderness: a quaint little womanly child of seventeen--gowned, now, in
a black dress, long-skirted, to be sure! of her mother's old-fashioned
wearing. Gray eyes, wide, dark-lashed, sun-sparkling and shadowy, and
wi