and wished everybody a "Merry Christmas" before
it was light in the morning, and lent every one of her new toys to the
neighbors' children before noon, and eaten turkey and plum pudding, and
gone to bed at night in a trance of happiness at the day's pleasures.

Donald was away at college now. Paul and Hugh were great manly
fellows, taller than their mother. Papa Bird had grey hairs in his
whiskers; and Grandma, God bless her, had been four Christmases in
heaven. But Christmas in the Birds' Nest was scarcely as merry now as
it used to be in the bygone years, for the little child that once
brought such an added blessing to the day, lay, month after month, a
patient, helpless invalid, in the room where she was born.

She had never been very strong in body, and it was with a pang of
terror her mother and father noticed, soon after she was five years
old, that she began to limp, ever so slightly; to complain too often of
weariness, and to nestle close to her mother, saying she "would rather
not go out to play, please." The illness was slight at first, and hope
was always stirring in Mrs. Bird's heart. "Carol would feel stronger
in the summer-time;" or, "She would be better when she had spent a year
in the country;" or, "She would outgrow it;" or, "They would try a new
physician;" but by and by it came to be all too sure that no physician
save One could make Carol strong again, and that no "summer-time" nor
"country air," unless it were the everlasting summer-time in a heavenly
country, could bring back the little girl to health.

The cheeks and lips that were once as red as holly-berries faded to
faint pink; the star-like eyes grew softer, for they often gleamed
through tears; and the gay child-laugh, that had been like a chime of
Christmas bells, gave place to a smile so lovely, so touching, so
tender and patient, that it filled every corner of the house with a
gentle radiance that might have come from the face of the Christ-child
himself.

Love could do nothing; and when we have said that we have said all, for
it is stronger than anything else in the whole wide world. Mr. and
Mrs. Bird were talking it over one evening when all the children were
asleep. A famous physician had visited them that day, and told them
that sometime, it might be in one year, it might be in more, Carol
would slip quietly off into heaven, whence she came.

"Dear heart," said Mr. Bird, pacing up and down the library floor, "it
is no use t