nd
asked him if I might have the two songs I like best. Will you see if it
is all right?"

BIRDS' NEST, DECEMBER 21, 188-.

DEAR MR. WILKIE,--I am the little girl who lives next door to the
church, and, as I seldom go out, the music on practice days and
Sundays is one of my greatest pleasures.

I want to know if you can have "Carol, brothers, carol," on
Christmas night, and if the boy who sings "My ain countree" so
beautifully may please sing that too. I think it is the loveliest
thing in the world, but it always makes me cry; doesn't it you?

If it isn't too much trouble, I hope they can sing them both quite
early, as after ten o'clock I may be asleep.

Yours respectfully,
CAROL BIRD.

P.S.--The reason I like "Carol, brothers, carol," is because the
choir-boys sang it eleven years ago, the morning I was born, and
put it into Mamma's head to call me Carol. She didn't remember then
that my other name would be Bird, because she was half asleep, and
could only think of one thing at a time. Donald says if I had been
born on the Fourth of July they would have named me "Independence,"
or if on the twenty-second of February, "Georgina," or even
"Cherry," like Cherry in "Martin Chuzzlewit;" but I like my own
name and birthday best.

Yours truly,
CAROL BIRD.

Uncle Jack thought the letter quite right, and did not even smile at her
telling the organist so many family items.

The days flew by as they always fly in holiday time, and it was
Christmas Eve before anybody knew it. The family festival was quiet and
very pleasant, but almost overshadowed by the grander preparations for
the next day. Carol and Elfrida, her pretty German nurse, had ransacked
books, and introduced so many plans, and plays, and customs, and
merry-makings from Germany, and Holland, and England, and a dozen other
countries, that you would scarcely have known how or where you were
keeping Christmas. Even the dog and the cat had enjoyed their
celebration under Carol's direction. Each had a tiny table with a
lighted candle in the centre, and a bit of Bologna sausage placed very
near it; and everybody laughed till the tears stood in their eyes to see
Villikins and Dinah struggle to nibble the sausage