mother, two or three children, and their
dog Ready made up the quiet household: not one to attract notice from
any cause. People soon knew Martha Yarrow,--all that was in her. She was
Western- and farm-born; whatever Nature had given her of good or bad,
therefore, thrust itself out at once with pungent directness.

The family supported themselves by selling their poultry and vegetables
to the hucksters, leading an eventless life enough, until the change
occurred, some five years after they came into the neighborhood, of
which I am going to tell you.

I called it a Christmas Story, not so much because it happened on a
Christmas, as because the meaning of it seemed suited to that day; and I
thought, too, that nobody grows tired of Christmas stories, especially
if he chance to have been born in one of those families where the day is
kept in the old fashion: it roots itself so deep, that memory, in
whatever quaint superstition, or homely affection for mother or brother,
or unreasoning trust in God, may outlive our childhood, and underlie our
older years. And surely that is as just, as wise a thing,--to strip off
for a child the smirched trading-dress of one day at least, and send it
down through the long procession of the years with its true face bared,
to waken in him a live sense of man's love and God's love. Some one,
perhaps, had done this for this woman, Mrs. Yarrow, long ago; for, let
the months before and after be bare as they chose, she kept this day of
Christmas with a feverish anxiety, more eager than her children even to
make every moment warm and throb with pleasure, and enjoying them
herself, to their last breath, with the whole zest of a nervous,
strong-blooded nature. Yet she may have had another reason for it.

The evening before the Christmas of which we write, she had gone out to
the well with her son before closing the house for the night.

"There's no danger of thaw before morning, Jem?"--looking anxiously up
into the night, as they rested the bucket on the curb.

"Thaw! there's a woman's notion for you! Why, the very crow is frozen
out of the cocks yonder!"--stretching his arms, and clapping his hollow
cheat, as if he were six feet high. "No, we'll not have a thaw, little
woman."

The children often called her that, in a fond, protecting way; but it
sounded most oddly from Jem, he was such a weak, swaggering sparrow of a
little chap. He stretched his hands as high as he could reach up to her
hips