Christmas Day, the dear Christ-child
came, to bless the tree for the children. But when he looked at it--_what_
do you suppose?--it was covered with cobwebs! Everywhere the little
spiders had been they had left a spider-web; and you know they had been
everywhere. So the tree was covered from its trunk to its tip with
spider-webs, all hanging from the branches and looped round the twigs; it
was a strange sight.

What could the Christ-child do? He knew that house-mothers do not like
cobwebs; it would never, never do to have a Christmas Tree covered with
those. No, indeed.

So the dear Christ-child touched the spider's webs, and turned them all to
gold! Wasn't that a lovely trimming? They shone and shone, all over the
beautiful tree. And that is the way the Christmas Tree came to have
golden cobwebs on it.

WHY THE MORNING-GLORY CLIMBS[1]

[Footnote 1: This story was given me by Miss Elisabeth McCracken, who
wrote it some years ago in a larger form, and who told it to me in the way
she had told it to many children of her acquaintance.]

Once the Morning-Glory was flat on the ground. She grew that way, and she
had never climbed at all. Up in the top of a tree near her lived Mrs
Jennie Wren and her little baby Wren. The little Wren was lame; he had a
broken wing and couldn't fly. He stayed in the nest all day. But the
mother Wren told him all about what she saw in the world, when she came
flying home at night. She used to tell him about the beautiful
Morning-Glory she saw on the ground. She told him about the Morning-Glory
every day, until the little Wren was filled with a desire to see her for
himself.

"How I wish I could see the Morning-Glory!" he said.

The Morning-Glory heard this, and she longed to let the little Wren see
her face. She pulled herself along the ground, a little at a time, until
she was at the foot of the tree where the little Wren lived. But she could
not get any farther, because she did not know how to climb. At last she
wanted to go up so much, that she caught hold of the bark of the tree,
and pulled herself up a little. And little by little, before she knew it,
she was climbing.

And she climbed right up the tree to the little Wren's nest, and put her
sweet face over the edge of the nest, where the little Wren could see.

That was how the Morning-Glory came to climb.

THE STORY OF LITTLE TAVWOTS[1]

[Footnote 1: Adapted from _The Basket Woman_, by Mary Austin.]

This is the story