-trees," said Dame Louisa.

Then all the scholars cried out with delight, the Christmas-bells in
the village began to ring, the silver hen flew up on the fence and
crowed, the sun shone broadly out, and it was a merry Christmas-day.

TOBY.

Aunt Malvina was sitting at the window watching for a horse-car which
she wanted to take. Uncle Jack was near the register in a comfortable
easy chair, his feet on an embroidered foot-rest, and Letitia, just as
close to him as she could get her little rocking-chair, was sewing her
square of patchwork "over and over." Letitia had to sew a square of
patchwork "over and over" every day.

Aunt Malvina, who was not uncle Jack's wife, as one might suspect, but
his elder sister, was a very small, frisky little lady, with a thin,
rosy face, and a little bobbing bunch of gray curls on each side
of it. She talked very fast, and she talked all the time, so she
accomplished a vast deal of talking in the course of a day, and the
people she happened to be with did a vast deal of listening.

She was talking now, and uncle Jack was listening, with his head
leaning comfortably against a pretty tidy all over daisies in
Kensington work, and so was Letitia, taking cautious little stitches
in her patchwork.

"Mrs. Welcome," aunt Malvina had just remarked, "has got a little
colored boy as black as Toby to wait on table."

Letitia opened her sober, light gray eyes very wide, and stared
reflectively at aunt Malvina.

"It was dark as Pokonoket when we came out of church last night," said
aunt Malvina after a time, in the course of conversation.

Letitia stared reflectively at her again.

"There's my car coming around the corner!" cried aunt Malvina, and ran
friskily out of the room. Just outside the door she turned and thrust
her face, with the little gray curls dancing around it, in again for a
last word. "O, Jack!" cried she, "I hear that Edward Simonds' eldest
son is as crazy as a loon!"

"Is?"

"Yes; isn't it dreadful? Good-by!" Aunt Malvina frisked airily
downstairs, and out on the street, barely in time to secure her car.

When Letitia heard the front door close after her, she quilted her
needle carefully into her square, then she folded the patchwork up
neatly, rose, and laid it together with her thimble, scissors, and
cotton, in her little rocking-chair. Then she went and stood still
before uncle Jack, with her arms folded. It was a way she had when she
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