s toil for
their daily bread and scanty apparel all the year, and have no time
nor means to provide themselves or their children with the comforts and
luxuries you enjoy. Each one can spare a little to minister to the
enjoyment of those poor suffering children, many of whom, perhaps, have
no fathers to provide for them, some of them not even a home to shelter
them. Share with them your abundance, and the blessings of the poor
shall rest upon you. And now, my patient little readers, for the story.

One Christmas night we were all gathered around a cheerful fire in the
old-fashioned parlor. Father, mother, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts,
and cousins, were all there. The blazing pine knots sent a cheerful
light into every nook and corner of the big room; the ponderous presses,
and quaint old desk and bookcase, reflecting the warm glow from their
polished surfaces.

The straight, high-backed, mahogany chairs had been sadly knocked about
in a game of blind-man's-buff, and looked as much out of place as a prim
old maiden aunt in a game of romps. Nut-shells and apple-parings,
kiss-papers and mottoes, strewed the broad hearth, and gave pretty good
token of the evening's cheer. The clock had just struck ten, and we
youngsters were warned that it was bedtime, when there arose a loud call
for a story. A story from Uncle Ned! We might all sit up to hear a
story, if Uncle Ned would tell one.

He, good soul, never refused a kind request in his life, and we felt
quite safe for the next half hour. I think I see him now, with his trim
leg encased in a fine home-knit stocking--his bright shoe-buckles, and
neat drab small-clothes--his queer-looking continental hat, with his
gray locks appearing beneath it, and his hands resting upon the head of
his silver-mounted cane.

[Illustration: Portrait of Uncle Ned.]

The chairs were set in their places, stragglers called in, and all were
seated in silence to hear.

[Illustration]

UNCLE NED'S STORY.

"Many years ago, when I was a slip of a lad like Tom there"--"Why,
uncle," cried little Willy in amazement, "did you say you were no bigger
than Tom? Were you ever as little as Tom, uncle?"--"Hush, Willy," said
Tom, a well-grown boy of fourteen, "I'm sure you need not make such a
wonderment at that; I am not so very small, and I expect to be as big as
Uncle Ned when I'm a man. How naughty of you to interrupt the story!"

[Illustration: Ned and his Companions at the Pond.]

"Well, Wil