n the Mayflower, and
no holly trimmed the little cabin.

The Pilgrims were true to the faith they loved. They held no special
service. They made no gifts.

Instead, they went again to the work of cutting the trees, and no one
murmured at his hard lot.

"We went on shore," one man wrote in his diary, "some to fell timber,
some to saw, some to rive, and some to carry; so no man rested all that
day."

As for little Remember, she spent the day on board the Mayflower. She
heard no one speak of England or sigh for the English home across the
sea. But she did not forget Mistress Brewster's story; and more than
once that day, as she was playing by herself, she fancied that she was
in front of some English home, helping the English children sing their
Christmas songs. And both Mistress Allerton and Mistress Standish, whom
God was soon to call away from their earthly home, felt happier and
stronger as they heard the little girl singing:

He neither shall be born
In housen nor in hall,
Nor in the place of Paradise,
But in an ox's stall.

XXVII. THE CRATCHITS' CHRISTMAS DINNER

(Adapted)

CHARLES DICKENS

Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present stood in the city streets on
Christmas morning, where (for the weather was severe) the people made a
rough but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow
from the pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of
their houses, whence it was mad delight to the boys to see it come
plumping down into the road below, and splitting into artificial little
snowstorms.

The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker,
contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with
the dirtier snow upon the ground, which last deposit had been ploughed
up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and wagons; furrows
that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great
streets branched off, and made intricate channels, hard to trace, in
the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest
streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen,
whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all
the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and
were blazing away to their dear heart's content. There was nothing
very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of
cheerfulness abroad that the dearest summ