he sons' wives and daughters' husbands and children. She
loved them all;--yet--to have her own, and no others, just for this
one day--it was happiness indeed.

When they were all downstairs, about the fire, there was great
rejoicing. They had Marietta in; indeed, she had been hovering
continuously in the background, to the apparently frightful jeopardy
of the breakfast in preparation, upon which, nevertheless, she had
managed to keep a practised eye.

"And you were in it, Marietta?" Mr. Fernald said to her in
astonishment, when he first saw her. "How in the world did you get all
these people into the house and to bed without waking us?"

"It was pretty consid'able of a resk," Marietta replied, with modest
pride, "'seein' as how they was inclined to be middlin' lively. But I
kep' a-hushin' 'em up, and I filled 'em up so full of victuals they
couldn't talk. I didn't know's there'd be any eatables left for
to-day," she added--which last remark, since she had been slyly baking
for a week, Guy thought might be considered pure bluff.

At the breakfast table, while the eight heads were bent, this
thanksgiving arose, as the master of the house, in a voice not quite
steady, offered it to One Unseen:

_Thou who camest to us on that first Christmas Day, we bless Thee for
this good and perfect gift Thou sendest us to-day, that Thou
forgettest us not in these later years, but givest us the greatest joy
of our lives in these our loyal children._

Nan's hand clutched Guy's under the table. "Doesn't that make it worth
it?" his grasp said to her, and hers replied with a frantic pressure,
"Indeed it does, but we don't deserve it."

... It was late in the afternoon, a tremendous Christmas dinner well
over, and the group scattered, when Guy and his mother sat alone by
the fire. The "boys" had gone out to the great stock barn with their
father to talk over with him every detail of the prosperous business
he, with the help of an invaluable assistant, was yet able to manage.
Carolyn and Nan had ostensibly gone with them, but in reality the
former was calling upon an old friend of her childhood, and the latter
had begged a horse and sleigh and driven merrily away alone upon an
errand she would tell no one but her mother.

[Illustration: "'MERRY CHRISTMAS, MAMMY AND DADDY!'"]

Mrs. Fernald sat in her low chair at the side of the hearth, her son
upon a cushion at her feet, his head resting against her knee. Her
slender fingers were ge