held it out to her,
"that Himself is after giving me in a Christmas box! Now we'll do the
thing in real style! Come along out now, before the shops shut, and
we'll buy all before us!"

Well, if you were to see the two of them that night! the three, indeed,
for Delia wouldn't ever leave the child, only took him with her. To see
them looking in at the grand bright windows full of things! and going
in, Delia half afraid, but Art as loud and outspoken as a lord, spending
free as long as it lasted! To see him then going home with her and the
child, and he all loaded down with parcels! and opened them all out, the
minute they got back! All the things they bought out of that money! A
pipe and tobacco for Michael; a lovely cake with "Merry Christmas" in
pink sugar upon it, for Herself; the grandest of brown shoes and a hat
and feather for Delia, and as for the baby!... Delia could scarce
believe her eyes, all they had got for him, things she had been
wanting....

Art made her fit them all on, and when she held up the child to be
admired, with the loveliest of a soft white shawl rolled round him, "He
becomes it well," says Art; "and I suppose you think to make him look
better nor he is, by all that finery!"

"Your mother'll think him terrible small," said Delia, looking very
fretted again; but she kissed the baby, as much as to say, "Little I
care what she thinks!"

She said nothing about that part of it, though, only looked up at Art
with the beseeching eyes I mentioned before.

"Let that go round!" says Art; and he lifted the two of them in his arms
and kissed them both; and then when he had let Delia go, says he, "Me
mother is the smallest little crathureen herself, that ever you saw! So
she needn't talk! And sure what can you expect from a child not a month
old yet! And there's an ould saying and a true one, in Ardenoo, 'It's
not always the big people that reaps the harvest!' and so by this boy of
ours! We won't feel till he'll be working!"

"Working!" said Delia. And she unclasped the baby's fingers and kissed
the tiny hands inside, that were as soft and pink as rose-leaves, first
one hand and then the other. She never thought that every hand, no
matter how rough and strong, begins by being a baby's hand like the one
she was after kissing.

"Ay, work!" says Art, very determined; "it would amaze you or any one
that didn't know, the way the children grow up and get sense at Ardenoo!
the way if the old people seemed