girl! Once she had fallen into a brook,
and once into a well, beside falling sick times without number. Uncle
Ben and Aunt Charlotte knew all this, but they did not happen to know
that it was a very common thing for Flaxie to be crazy! It was just so
with her brother Preston and her sister Ninny; they seldom had any
little ailment like a bad cold without "going out of their heads," and
nobody in the family minded it at all.

If Flaxie's mother had been at Hilltop, she would have sent Uncle Ben
and Aunt Charlotte to bed; but as she was not there, and they didn't
know any better, they sat up all night watching their queer little
niece.

Rather a sorry "Christmas eve" all around the house,--but a beautiful
Christmas morning, and not a cloud in the sky. Flaxie woke as gay as a
bird, without the least recollection of the horrors she had suffered in
the night from tigers and tea-kettles.

"Wish you merry Christmas!" cried she to pale Aunt Charlotte, and sprang
out of bed with poultices on her feet to go after her Christmas
stocking.

"Well, is this the little girl they thought was so sick," said Dr.
Pulsifer, when he arrived at noon, and found her and Milly lying on the
rug, with a pair of twin dolls between them dressed just alike, and each
with a fur cap on its head.

He felt Flaxie's pulse and looked at her tongue, and said he "shouldn't
waste any of his nice medicine on _her_."

"But my cold isn't good at all, now honest; and my throat's a little
sore--I guess," said Flaxie, drawing a long face, and feeling rather
ashamed not to be sick now, when the doctor had been sent for on
purpose!

"Never mind! If you don't need me, your aunt does. What do you think of
yourself, you little piece of mischief, running away in the night, and
frightening people so that they are sick abed Christmas day?"

All Flaxie's good time was over in a minute. _Was_ auntie sick abed
up-stairs? Was that why Flaxie hadn't seen her since morning?

"Oh, mayn't I go look at her?" said she, after the doctor had left. And
Uncle Ben consented, thinking she wouldn't stay a minute.

"Oh, I'm so sorry! I do love you dearly," cried penitent Flaxie,
climbing upon the bed and cuddling close to the white auntie. "_Did_ I
make you sick? I didn't mean to; and I don't 'member anything about the
tea-kettle."

"There, there, dear, don't cry."

"I oughtn't to stayed up-stairs yesterday in the cold," went on Flaxie,
determined to free her mind. "That wa