vent!"

"You take everything so serious. Can't you see the fun of this?"

"No," said Laddie. "But if you can, I am glad, and I'm thankful for
anything that gives me a glimpse of you."

"Bye, Little Sister," said the Princess, and when she loosened the
lines the mud flew a rod high.

CHAPTER XI

Keeping Christmas Our Way

"I remember, I remember
How my childhood fleeted by,--
The mirth of its December,
And the warmth of its July."

When dusk closed in it would be Christmas eve. All day I had three
points--a chair beside the kitchen table, a lookout melted through the
frost on the front window, and the big sitting-room fireplace.

All the perfumes of Araby floated from our kitchen that day. There was
that delicious smell of baking flour from big snowy loaves of bread,
light biscuit, golden coffee cake, and cinnamon rolls dripping a waxy
mixture of sugar, butter, and spice, much better than the finest
butterscotch ever brought from the city. There was the tempting odour
of boiling ham and baking pies. The air was filled with the smell of
more herbs and spices than I knew the names of, that went into
mincemeat, fruit cake, plum pudding, and pies. There was a teasing
fragrance in the spiced vinegar heating for pickles, a reminder of
winesap and rambo in the boiling cider, while the newly opened bottles
of grape juice filled the house with the tang of Concord and muscadine.
It seemed to me I never got nicely fixed where I could take a sly dip
in the cake dough or snipe a fat raisin from the mincemeat but Candace
would say: "Don't you suppose the backlog is halfway down the lane?"

Then I hurried to the front window, where I could see through my melted
outlook on the frosted pane, across the west eighty to the woods, where
father and Laddie were getting out the Christmas backlog. It was too
bitterly cold to keep me there while they worked, but Laddie said that
if I would watch, and come to meet them, he would take me up, and I
might ride home among the Christmas greens on the log.

So I flattened my nose against the pane and danced and fidgeted until
those odours teased me back to the kitchen; and no more did I get
nicely located beside a jar of pudding sauce than Candace would object
to the place I had hung her stocking. It was my task, my delightful
all-day task, to hang the stockings. Father had made me a peg for each
one, and I had ten feet of mantel front along which to arrange