t were off now, and Jim was bearing them upstairs to be
laid on Miss Nancy's bed.

As the small, frail hand touched his own I saw a strange look come
into the Colonel's eyes. It was evidently all he could do to keep from
stooping down and kissing her.

Instinctively my mind went back to a night not long before when I had
found him sitting by his fire. "There is but one thing in all the
world, Major," he said to me then, "sweeter than the song of a robin
in the spring, and that is the laughter of a child."

I knew therefore, as I looked at these two, what the little hand that
lay in his meant to him.

So I held the candle and the Colonel lighted the tip end of just one
tiny taper to show her how it burned, and what a pretty light it made
shining through the green; and Katy clapped her hands and said it was
beautiful, and such a darling little tree, and not at all like the
big one in the Sunday School that reached nearly to the ceiling, and
that nobody dared to touch. And then we all went back to the fire and
the Colonel's chair, and before I knew it he had her by his side with
his arm around her shoulders, telling her stories, while Aunt Nancy
and Jim and I sat listening.

And so absorbed was he in the new life, and so happy with the child,
that he only gave Fitz three fingers to shake when that friend of his
heart came in, and never once said he was glad to see him--an
unprecedented omission--and never once made the slightest allusion to
the expected guest of the evening, Mr. Klutchem, now that his daughter
had turned out to be a child of seven instead of a full-grown woman of
twenty.

The Colonel told her of the great woods behind Carter Hall, where the
Christmas tree had grown, and the fox with the white tail that lived
there, and that used to pop into his hole in the snow, and how you'd
pass right by and never see him because his tail, which was the
biggest part of him, was so white; and the woodpeckers that bored into
the bark with their long, sharp bills; and finally of the big turkeys
that strutted and puffed their feathers and spread their tails about
and ran so fast nothing could catch them.

"Not even a dog?" interrupted the child. She had crawled up into his
arms now and was looking up into his face with wondering eyes.

"Dogs!" answered the Colonel contemptuously, "why, these turkeys would
be up and gone befo' a dog could turn 'round."

"Tell me what they are like. Have they long--long legs--so?" a