stmas
litter.

"Do you expect to straighten out all these things, daughter?" he asked
hopelessly.

"Why, there's hardly anything left to do," was Betty's cheerful assurance.
"You just sit down at the table and put the nuts into the toes of those
stockings, and I'll count out these print frocks."

The Governor obediently sat down and went to work. "I am moved to offer
thanks that we are not as the beasts that have four legs," he remarked
thoughtfully. "I shouldn't care to fill stockings for quadrupeds, Betty."

"Why, you goose, there's only one stocking for each child."

"Ah, but with four feet our expectations might be doubled," suggested the
Governor. "You can't convince me that it isn't a merciful providence, my
dear."

When the stockings were filled and the packages neatly tied up and
separated, Uncle Shadrach came with a hamper, and Betty went out to the
kitchen to prepare for the morning gathering of the field hands and their
families. Returning after the work was over, she lingered a moment in the
path to the house, looking far across the white country. The snow had
ceased, and a single star was shining, through a rift in the scudding
clouds, straight overhead. From the northwest the wind blew hard, and the
fleecy covering on the ground was fast freezing a foot deep in ice. With a
shiver she drew her cloak about her and ran indoors and upstairs to where
Virginia lay asleep in the high, white bed.

In the great brick fireplace the logs had fallen apart, and she softly
pushed them together again as she threw on a knot of resinous pine. The
blaze shot up quickly, and blowing out the candle upon the bureau, she
undressed by the firelight, crooning gently as she did so in a voice that
was lower than the singing flames. With the glow on her bared arms and her
hair unbound upon her shoulders, she sat close against the chimney; and
while Virginia slept in the tester bed, went dreaming out into the night.

At first her dreams went back into her childhood, and somehow, she knew not
why, she could not bring back her childhood but Dan came with it. She
fancied herself in all kinds of impossible places, but she had no sooner
got safely into them than she looked up and Dan was there before her,
standing very still and laughing at her with his eyes. It was the same
thing even when she was a baby. Her earliest memory was of a May morning
when they took her out into a field of buttercups, and told her that she
might pluck