n a merry Christmas?

"The cat didn't get the robin, Sally?"

"Not he! The robin was too sharp by half. Such a little darling! But
I was sorry for the cat."

"Poor pussy! Not our pussy, was it?"

"Oh no; it was that piebald Tom that lives in at the empty house next
door."

"I know. Horrible beast!"

"Well, but just think of being out in the cold in this weather, with
nothing to eat! Oo--oo--oogh!" Sally illustrates, with an intentional
shudder. "I wonder who that is!"

"I didn't hear any one."

"You'll see, he'll ring directly. I know who it is; it's Mr. Fenwick
come to say he can't come to-night. I heard the click of his skates.
They've a sort of twinkly click, skates have, when they're swung by
a strap. He'll go out and skate all day. He'll go to Wimbledon."

The girl's hearing was quite correct. A ring came at the
bell--Krakatoa had no knocker--and a short colloquy followed between
Jane and the ringer. Then he departed, with his twinkly click and
noiseless footstep on the snow, slamming the front gate. Jane was able
to include a card he had left in a recrudescence or reinforcement of
hot water. Sally takes the card and looks at it, and her mother says,
"Well, Sally?" with a slight remonstrance against the unfairness of
keeping back information after you have satisfied your own
curiosity--a thing people are odious about, as we all know.

"_He's_ coming all right," says Sally, looking at both sides of the
card, and passing it on when she has quite done with it. Sally, we may
mention, as it occurs to us at this moment,--though _why_ we have no
idea,--means to have a double chin when she is five years older than
her mother is now. At present it--the chin--is merely so much youthful
roundness and softness, very white underneath. Her mother is quite of
a different type. Her daughter's father must have had black hair, for
Sally can make huge shining coils, or close plaits, very wide, out of
her inheritance. Or it will assume the form of a bush, if indulged,
till Sally is almost hidden under it, as the Bosjesman under his
version of Birnam Wood, that he shoots his assegai from. But the
mother's is brown, with a tinge of chestnut; going well with her eyes,
which have a claret tone, or what is so called; but we believe people
really mean pale old port when they say so. She has had--still has, we
might say--a remarkably fine figure, and we don't feel the same faith
in Miss Sally's. That young lassie will get descri