A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others by Charles Dickens Page B

comfortable."
    Still old Marg looked doubtful. Wiping her cheeks with a corner of the shawl, she half turned toward the door.
    "Have you a family, or any one belonging to you?" asked Angela, thinking to have reached the root of the difficulty.
    "Yes," said the old woman stoutly. "I have a cat. Where I go, she must go, too!"
    Angela patted the grimy hand, with a laugh which was good to hear.
    "I understand you perfectly," she said. "I have a cat of my own. You and
your
cat shall not be separated."
    A half-hour later entered the young man Robert. Angela pointed silently to old Marg, sitting in a warm corner, contentedly munching her Christmas dinner. "What have you done to her?" he asked. "She looks more human already."
    Angela laughed again, that same laugh which goes to one's heart so. "I have adopted her--and her cat!" she answered. "That's all!"
----
    THE FIRST PURITAN CHRISTMAS TREE.
    (ANONYMOUS.)
    Mrs. Olcott called her boys, and bade them go to the pine woods and get the finest, handsomest young hemlock tree that they could find.
    "Get one that is straight and tall, with well-boughed branches on it, and put it where you can draw it under the wood-shed after dark," she added.
    The boys went to Pine Hill, and there they picked out the finest young tree on all the hill, and said, "We will take this one." So, with their hatchets they hewed it down and brought it safely home the next night when all was dark. And when Roger was quietly sleeping in the adjoining room, they dragged the tree into the kitchen. It was too tall, so they took it out again and cut it off two or three feet at the base. Then they propped it up, and the curtains being down over the windows, and blankets being fastened over the curtains to prevent any one looking in, and the door being doubly barred to prevent any one coming in, they all went to bed.
    Very early the next morning, while the stars shone on the snow-covered hills--the same stars that shone sixteen hundred years before on the hills when Christ was born in Bethlehem--the little Puritan mother in New England arose very softly. She went out and lit the kitchen fire anew from the ash-covered embers. She fastened upon the twigs of the tree the gifts she had bought in Boston for her boys and girl. Then she took as many as twenty pieces of candle and fixed them upon the branches. After that she softly called Rupert, Robert and Lucy, and told them to get up and come into the kitchen.
    Hurrying back, she began, with a bit of a burning stick, to light the candles. Just as the last one was set aflame, in trooped the three children.
    Before they had time to say a word, they were silenced by their mother's warning.
    "I wish to fetch Roger in and wake him up before it," she said. "Keep still until I come back!"
    The little lad, fast asleep, was lifted in a blanket and gently carried by his mother into the beautiful presence.
    "See! Roger, my boy, see!" she said, arousing him. "It is Christmas morning now! In England they only have Christmas-boughs, but here in New England we have a whole Christmas-tree."
    "O mother!" he cried. "O Lucy! Is it really, really true, and no dream at all? Yes, I see! I see! O mother, it is so beautiful! Were all the trees on all the hills lighted up that way when Christ was born? And, mother," he added, clapping his little hands with joy at the thought, "why, yes, the stars did sing when Christ was born! They must be glad, then, and keep Christmas, too, in heaven. I know they must, and there will be good times there."
    "Yes," said his mother; "there will be good times there, Roger."
    "Then," said the boy, "I sha'n't mind going, now that I've seen the Christmas-bough. I--What is that, mother?"
    What was it that they heard? The little Olcott home had never before seemed to tremble so. There were taps at the window, there were knocks at the door--and it was as yet scarcely the break of day! There were voices also, shouting something to somebody.
    "Shall I put out the candles,