clerks. Pedlers offering tinsel and colored candles
waylaid them on the door-step. The rack under the butcher's awning
fairly groaned with its weight of plucked geese, of turkeys, stout and
skinny, of poultry of every kind. The saloon-keeper even had wreathed
his door-posts in ground-ivy and hemlock, and hung a sprig of holly in
the window, as if with a spurious promise of peace on earth and
good-will toward men who entered there. It tempted not Joe. He drove
past it to the corner, where he turned up a street darker and lonelier
than the rest, toward a stretch of rocky, vacant lots fenced in by an
old stone wall. 'Liza turned in at the rude gate without being told,
and pulled up at the house.

A plain little one-story frame with a lean-to for a kitchen, and an
adjoining stable-shed, overshadowed all by two great chestnuts of the
days when there were country lanes where now are paved streets, and on
Manhattan Island there was farm by farm. A light gleamed in the
window looking toward the street. As 'Liza's hoofs were heard on the
drive, a young girl with a shawl over her head ran out from some
shelter where she had been watching, and took the reins from Joe.

"You're late," she said, stroking the mare's steaming flank. 'Liza
reached around and rubbed her head against the girl's shoulder,
nibbling playfully at the fringe of her shawl.

"Yes; we've come far, and it's been a hard pull. 'Liza is tired. Give
her a good feed, and I'll bed her down. How's mother?"

"Sprier than she was," replied the girl, bending over the shaft to
unbuckle the horse; "seems as if she'd kinder cheered up for
Christmas." And she led 'Liza to the stable while her father backed
the wagon into the shed.

It was warm and very comfortable in the little kitchen, where he
joined the family after "washing up." The fire burned brightly in the
range, on which a good-sized roast sizzled cheerily in its pot,
sending up clouds of savory steam. The sand on the white-pine floor
was swept in tongues, old-country fashion. Joe and his wife were both
born across the sea, and liked to keep Christmas eve as they had kept
it when they were children. Two little boys and a younger girl than
the one who had met him at the gate received him with shouts of glee,
and pulled him straight from the door to look at a hemlock branch
stuck in the tub of sand in the corner. It was their Christmas tree,
and they were to light it with candles, red and yellow and green,
which