there. Really, Matty, it is a great deal warmer
than it was yesterday."

"Dear child," said Matty, to whom everybody came so
readily for advice and help, "I can do better for you
than that. You shall come into the study; papa will be
away all the morning, and I will have the fire kept up
there,--and mamma shall never come near you."

All this, and a thousand times more of plotting and
counterplotting, was going on among four children and
their elders in a comfortable, free-and-easy seeming
household in Washington, as the boys and girls, young men
and young women were in the last agonies of making ready
for Christmas. Matty is fully entitled to be called a
young woman, when we see her. She has just passed her
twenty-first birthday. But she looks as fresh and pretty
as when she was seventeen, and certainly she is a great
deal pleasanter though she be wiser. She is the oldest
of the troop. Tom, the next, is expected from Annapolis
this afternoon, and Beverly from Charlotte. Then come
four boys and girls whose ages and places the reader must
guess at as we go on.

The youngest of the family were still young enough to
write the names of the presents which they would be glad
to receive, or to denote them by rude hieroglyphs, on
large sheets of paper. They were wont to pin up these
sheets on certain doors, which, by long usage in this
free-and-easy family, had come to be regarded as the