No one else in the village, probably no one else in the county, owned
any such tree, alive or dead. Dame Louisa's husband, who had been
a sea-captain, had brought them from foreign parts. They were mere
little twigs when they planted them on the first day of January, but
they were full-grown and loaded with fruit by the next Christmas-day.
Every Christmas they were cut down and sold, but they always grew
again to their full height, in a year's time. They were not, it is
true, the regulation Christmas-tree. That is they were not loaded with
different and suitable gifts for every one in a family, as they stood
there in Dame Louisa's yard. People always tied on those, after they
had bought them, and had set them up in their own parlors. But these
trees bore regular fruit like apple, or peach, or plum-trees, only
there was a considerable variety in it. These trees when in full
fruitage were festooned with strings of pop-corn, and weighed down
with apples and oranges and figs and bags of candy, and it was really
an amazing sight to see them out there in Dame Louisa's front yard.
But now they were all yellow and dead, and not so much as one pop-corn
whitened the upper branches, neither was there one candle shining
out in the night. For the trees in their prime had borne also little
twinkling lights like wax candles.

Dame Louisa looked out at her dead Christmas-trees, and scowled. She
could see the children out in the road, and they were trudging along
in the direction of the White Woods. "Let 'em go," she snapped to
herself. "I guess they won't go far. I'll be rid of their noise, any
way."

She could hear poor Dame Penny's distressed voice out in her yard,
calling "Biddy, Biddy, Biddy;" and she scowled more fiercely than