aper, and sealed outside with a
monogram--or your initial, anyway. So, then, she began to send her
letters; and in about three weeks--or just the day before Christmas,
it was--she got a letter from the Fairy, saying she might have it
Christmas every day for a year, and then they would see about having
it longer.

The little girl was a good deal excited already, preparing for the
old-fashioned, once-a-year Christmas that was coming the next day, and
perhaps the Fairy's promise didn't make such an impression on her as
it would have made at some other time. She just resolved to keep it to
herself, and surprise everybody with it as it kept coming true; and
then it slipped out of her mind altogether.

She had a splendid Christmas. She went to bed early, so as to let
Santa Claus have a chance at the stockings, and in the morning she was
up the first of anybody and went and felt them, and found hers all
lumpy with packages of candy, and oranges and grapes, and pocket-books
and rubber balls, and all kinds of small presents, and her big
brother's with nothing but the tongs in them, and her young lady
sister's with a new silk umbrella, and her papa's and mamma's with
potatoes and pieces of coal wrapped up in tissue-paper, just as they
always had every Christmas. Then she waited around till the rest of
the family were up, and she was the first to burst into the library,
when the doors were opened, and look at the large presents laid out on
the library-table--books, and portfolios, and boxes of stationery, and
breastpins, and dolls, and little stoves, and dozens of handkerchiefs,
and ink-stands, and skates, and snow-shovels, and photograph-frames,
and little easels, and boxes of water-colors, and Turkish paste, and
nougat, and candied cherries, and dolls' houses, and waterproofs--and
the big Christmas-tree, lighted and standing in a waste-basket in the
middle.

She had a splendid Christmas all day. She ate so much candy that she
did not want any breakfast; and the whole forenoon the presents kept
pouring in that the expressman had not had time to deliver the night
before; and she went round giving the presents she had got for other
people, and came home and ate turkey and cranberry for dinner, and
plum-pudding and nuts and raisins and oranges and more candy, and then
went out and coasted, and came in with a stomach-ache, crying; and her
papa said he would