he ground. Even when people tried to
recover their tempers they usually got somebody else's, and it made
the most dreadful mix.

The little girl began to get frightened, keeping the secret all to
herself; she wanted to tell her mother, but she didn't dare to; and
she was ashamed to ask the Fairy to take back her gift, it seemed
ungrateful and ill-bred, and she thought she would try to stand it,
but she hardly knew how she could, for a whole year. So it went on and
on, and it was Christmas on St. Valentine's Day and Washington's
Birthday, just the same as any day, and it didn't skip even the First
of April, though everything was counterfeit that day, and that was
some _little_ relief.

After a while coal and potatoes began to be awfully scarce, so many
had been wrapped up in tissue-paper to fool papas and mammas with.
Turkeys got to be about a thousand dollars apiece--

"Papa!"

"Well, what?"

"You're beginning to fib."

"Well, _two_ thousand, then."

And they got to passing off almost anything for turkeys--half-grown
humming-birds, and even rocs out of the _Arabian Nights_--the real
turkeys were so scarce. And cranberries--well, they asked a diamond
apiece for cranberries. All the woods and orchards were cut down for
Christmas-trees, and where the woods and orchards used to be it
looked just like a stubble-field, with the stumps. After a while they
had to make Christmas-trees out of rags, and stuff them with bran,
like old-fashioned dolls; but there were plenty of rags, because
people got so poor, buying presents for one another, that they
couldn't get any new clothes, and they just wore their old ones to
tatters. They got so poor that everybody had to go to the poor-house,
except the confectioners, and the fancy-store keepers, and the
picture-book sellers, and the expressmen; and _they_ all got so rich
and proud that they would hardly wait upon a person when he came to
buy. It was perfectly shameful!

Well, after it had gone on about three or four months, the little
girl, whenever she came into the room in the morning and saw those
great ugly, lumpy stockings dangling at the fire-place, and the
disgusting presents around everywhere, used to just sit down and
burst out crying. In six months she was perfectly exhausted; she
couldn't even cry any more; she just lay on the lounge and rolled her
eyes and panted. About the beginning of October