t put all heads
to work to plan: the stockings to be opened, and dinner, and maybe a
visit to the menagerie in the afternoon. That was Martha's surprise, and
she was not disappointed in the applause it brought. It made the tears
come to her eyes, an hour after, when she was going to bed, remembering
it.

"It takes such a little thing to make them happy," she said to
herself,--"or me, either," with a somewhat silly face.

She tried to thank God for giving them so much, but only sobbed. After
the confusion about the show was over, and Catty had been wakened into a
vague jungle of tigers and lions and Shetland ponies, and put to sleep
again, they subsided enough to remember the winding-up of the day. Quiet
that was to be; the children from Shag's Point were coming up, some
half-dozen in all, for their share of Christmas. Poorer than the
Yarrows, you understand? though but a little; in fact, there were not
many steps farther down: peahens and cranberries were not for every day.
Well, to-morrow evening Jem would tell them the story of the Stable and
the Child, and how that the Child was with us yet, if we could only see.
Jem was always his mother's spokesman, and put the meaning of Christmas
into words: she never talked of such things. Yet they always watched her
face, when they spoke of them,--watched it now, and looked, as she did,
into the little room beyond the kitchen where they sat, their eyes
growing still and brighter. There might have been a tinge of the savage
or the Frenchman in Martha Yarrow's nature, she had so strong a
propensity to make real, apparent to the senses, what few ideas she had,
even her religion. A good skill to do it, too. The recess out of the
kitchen was only a small closet, but, with the aid of a softly tinted
curtain or two, and the nebulous light of a concealed lamp, she had
contrived to give it an air of distance and reserve. Within were green
wreaths hung over the whitewashed walls, and an altar-shaped little
white table, covered with heaps of crimson leaves and bright berries,
such as grow in the snow; only a few flowers, but enough to fill the air
with fragrance; the children's Christmas gifts, and wax-lights burning
before a picture, the child Jesus, looking down on them with a smile as
glad as their own. A thoroughly real person to the boys, this Christ for
childhood; for she built the little altar before this picture on all
their holidays: something in the woman herself needing the st