spirit. She felt herself a year older, and more than
a year wiser, than when Christmas had first dawned upon her
consciousness.

Mis' Persis appeared on the ground by day-dawn. A great kettle was slung
over the kitchen fire, in which cakes of tallow were speedily
liquefying; a frame was placed quite across the kitchen to sustain
candle-rods, with a train of boards underneath to catch the drippings,
and Mis' Persis, with a brow like one of the Fates, announced: "Now we
can't hev any young 'uns in this kitchen to-day;" and Dolly saw that
there was no getting any attention in that quarter.

Mis' Persis, in a gracious Saturday afternoon mood, sitting in her own
tent-door dispensing hospitalities and cookies, was one thing; but Mis'
Persis in her armor, with her loins girded and a hard day's work to be
conquered, was quite another: she was terrible as Minerva with her
helmet on.

Dinner-baskets for all the children were hastily packed, and they were
sent off to school with the injunction on no account to show their faces
about the premises till night. The Doctor, warned of what was going on,
retreated to his study at the top of the house, where, serenely above
the lower cares of earth, he sailed off into President Edwards' treatise
on the nature of true virtue, concerning which he was preparing a paper
to read at the next association meeting.

That candles were a necessity of life he was well convinced, and by
faith he dimly accepted the fact that one day in the year the whole
house was to be devoted and given up to this manufacture; and his part
of the business, as he understood it, was, clearly, to keep himself out
of the way till it was over.

"There won't be much of a dinner at home, anyway," said Nabby to Dolly,
as she packed her basket with an extra doughnut or two. "I've got to go
to church to-day, 'cause I'm one of the singers, and your ma'll be busy
waitin' on _her_; so we shall just have a pick-up dinner, and you be
sure not to come home till night; by that time it'll be all over."

Dolly trotted off to school well content with the prospect before her: a
nooning, with leave to play with the girls at school, was not an
unpleasant idea.

But the first thing that saluted her on her arrival was that Bessie
Lewis--her own dear, particular Bessie--was going to have a Christmas
party at her house that afternoon, and was around distributing
invitations right and left among the scholars with a generous freedom.

"