imes, when they heard
the grown people talk of the great things that were happening around
them. Some of these little people never forgot the wonderful events
of which they heard, and afterward related them to their children and
grandchildren, which accounts for some of the interesting stories which
you may still hear, if you are good children.

The Christmas story that I have to tell you is about a boy and girl
who lived in Bordentown, New Jersey. The father of these children was
a soldier in General Washington's army, which was encamped a few miles
north of Trenton, on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River.
Bordentown, as you can see by looking on your map, if you have not
hidden them all away for the holidays, is about seven miles south of
Trenton, where fifteen hundred Hessians and a troop of British light
horse were holding the town. Thus you see that the British, in force,
were between Washington's army and Bordentown, besides which there were
some British and Hessian troops in the very town. All this seriously
interfered with Captain Tracy's going home to eat his Christmas dinner
with his wife and children. Kitty and Harry Tracy, who had not lived
long enough to see many wars, could not imagine such a thing as
Christmas without their father, and had busied themselves for weeks in
making everything ready to have a merry time with him. Kitty, who loved
to play quite as much as any frolicsome Kitty of to-day, had spent all
her spare time in knitting a pair of thick woollen stockings, which
seems a wonderful feat for a little girl only eight years old to
perform! Can you not see her sitting by the great chimney-place, filled
with its roaring, crackling logs, in her quaint, short-waisted dress,
knitting away steadily, and puckering up her rosy, dimpled face over the
strange twists and turns of that old stocking? I can see her, and I can
also hear her sweet voice as she chatters away to her mother about
"how 'sprised papa will be to find that his little girl can knit like a
grown-up woman," while Harry spreads out on the hearth a goodly store
of shellbarks that he has gathered and is keeping for his share of the
'sprise.

"What if he shouldn't come?" asks Harry, suddenly.

"Oh, he'll come! Papa never stays away on Christmas," says Kitty,
looking up into her mother's face for an echo to her words. Instead she
sees something very like tears in her mother's eyes.

"Oh, mamma, don't you think he'll come?"

"He