at she was old enough to have perfectly strange young men stare at her
so hard. It made my father rather nervous. He cut his hand on the
carving-knife. Nothing ever made my mother nervous.

Except for father cutting his hand it seemed to be a very nourishing
dinner. The tomato soup was pink with cream. The roast turkey didn't
look a single sad bit like any one you'd seen before. There was plenty
of hard-boiled egg with the spinach. The baked potatoes were frosted
with red pepper. There was mince pie. There was apple pie. There was
pumpkin pie. There were nuts and raisins. There were gay gold-paper
bonbons. And everywhere all through the house the funny blunt smell of
black coffee.

It was my brother Carol's duty always to bring in the Christmas tree. By
some strange mix-up of what is and what isn't my brother Carol was
dumb--stark dumb, I mean, and from birth. But tho he had never found
his voice he had at least never lost his shining face. Even now at
eleven in the twilightly end of a rainy Sunday, or most any day when he
had an earache, he still let mother call him "Shining Face." But if any
children called him "Shining Face" he kicked them. Even when he kicked
people, tho, he couldn't stop his face shining. It was very cheerful.
Everything about Carol was very cheerful. No matter, indeed, how much we
might play and whisper about gifts and tinsels and jolly-colored
candles, Christmas never, I think, seemed really _probable_ to any of us
until that one jumpy moment, just at the end of the Thanksgiving dinner,
when, heralded by a slam in the wood-shed, a hoppytyskip in the hall,
the dining-room door flung widely open on Carol's eyes twinkling like a
whole skyful of stars through the shaggy, dark branches of a young
spruce-tree. It made young Derry Willard laugh right out loud.

"Why, of all funny things!" he said. "On Thanksgiving Day! Why, it looks
like a Christmas tree!"

"It is a Christmas tree," explained my sister Rosalee very patiently. My
sister Rosalee was almost always very patient. But I had never seen her
patient with a young man before. It made her cheeks very pink. "It _is_
a Christmas tree," she explained. "That is, it's going to be a Christmas
tree! Just the very first second we get it 'budded' it'll start right in
to be a Christmas tree!"

"_Budded?_" puzzled young Derry Willard. Really for a person who looked
so much like the picture of the Fairy Prince in my best story-book, he
seemed just a littl