season.

She sat at the table absently tasting the savory pork stew, believing
that no one else was ever as miserable as she, and that she should never
feel like laughing again, when suddenly she remembered that she had
twenty-four cents change left from the dollar that her father gave her
to buy school-books, and she would--yes--she would give it to him as she
was starting for the Fair, and perhaps he would say that she might keep
it.

So she was all ready to laugh when Jim asked if the little boys in the
big cities wore muzzles like the dog he had seen in town this morning,
and when her mother asked if she would take pie, her "yes" was emphatic;
for a world of trouble had rolled off her heart, and she was her hopeful
self again.

After the dinner-dishes were washed, and the baby trotted away to
dream-land, Debby stole up to her room to look over the dress she was to
wear in the evening; as the ruffles in neck and wrists were fresh, she
found there was nothing for her to do but brush it and lay it out on the
bed. Still she lingered with an undefined feeling that it was
Christmas-day everywhere else, and if she could only----

All the week, while seeing and hearing about the presents the
school-girls were making, she had been full of vague longings to do
something for some one; but she had neither money nor material, and was
not at all sure how a present from her would be received by her father
and mother. "Perhaps I might make a pin-ball," she thought, beginning to
search through the old chest of drawers that stood at the foot of her
bed.

In the lowest drawer were odds and ends that she had been collecting for
years, and from one corner, carefully wrapped up, she drew a square of
black cloth in which was worked in wool a bunch of rose-buds, pink,
white and yellow, surrounded by their green leaves. A lady who had
boarded with them the last summer had begun it for a pair of slippers,
but after making two or three mistakes on it, had given it to Debby.

"I wonder if I could make it into a cushion for mother?" soliloquized
Debby, turning it around in her red fingers. "Mrs. Williams said old
flannel was good to stuff them with, and I can bind it with----" she
leaned forward and picked among her bunch of faded ribbons. "There is
nothing nice enough," she sighed; "but this green will _have_ to do."

[Illustration: DEBBY AND THE ICE-CREAM [SEE PAGE 227.]]

Wrapping herself in a quilt she sat down on the rounded top o