ver could perceive how the pudding was a poem to the cobbler
and his wife,--how a very actual sense of the live goodness of Jesus was
in it,--how its spicy steam contained all the cordial cheer and jollity
they had missed in meaningless days of the year. Then she brought her
sewing-chair, and sat down, quite idle.

"No work for to-night! I'll teach you how to keep Christmas, Janet,
woman!"

It was her first, one might say. Orphan girls that go about from house
to house sewing, as Jinny had done, don't learn Christmas by heart year
by year. It was a new experience: she was taking it in, one would think,
to look at her, with all her might, with the earnest blue eyes, the
shut-up brain behind the narrow forehead, the loving heart: a contracted
tenement, that heart, by-the-by, adapted for single lodgers. She wasn't
quite sure that Christmas was not, after all, a relic of Papistry,--for
Jinny was a thorough Protestant: a Christian, as far as she understood
Him, with a keen interest in the Indian missions. "Let us begin in our
own country," she said, and always prayed for the Sioux just after Adam
and Baby. In fact, if we are all parts of God's temple, Jinny was a
very essential, cohesive bit of mortar. Adam had a wider door for his
charity: it took all the world in, he thought,--though the preachers did
enter with a shove, as we know. However, this was Christmas: the word
took up all common things, the fierce wind without, the clean hearth,
the modest color on her cheek, the very baby, and made of them one
grand, sweet poem, that sang to the man the same story the angels told
eighteen centuries ago: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth
peace, good-will toward men."

Sitting there in the evenings, Adam was the talker: such a fund of
anecdote he had! Jinny never could hear the same story too often.
To-night there was a bit of a sigh in them: his heart was tender: about
the Christmases at home, when he and Nelly were little chubs together,
and hung up their stockings regularly every Christmas eve.

"Twins, Nelly an' me was, oldest of all. When I was bound to old Lowe,
it went hard, ef I couldn't scratch together enough for a bit of
ribbon-bow or a ring for Nell, come Christmas. She used to sell the old
flour-barrels an' rags, an' have her gift all ready by my plate that
mornin': never missed. I never hed a sweetheart then."

Jinny laid her hand on his knee.

"Ye 'r' glad o' that, little woman? Well, well! I didn't c