the village began to ring, the silver hen flew up on the fence and
crowed, the sun shone broadly out, and it was a merry Christmas-day.






TOBY.


Aunt Malvina was sitting at the window watching for a horse-car which
she wanted to take. Uncle Jack was near the register in a comfortable
easy chair, his feet on an embroidered foot-rest, and Letitia, just as
close to him as she could get her little rocking-chair, was sewing her
square of patchwork "over and over." Letitia had to sew a square of
patchwork "over and over" every day.

Aunt Malvina, who was not uncle Jack's wife, as one might suspect, but
his elder sister, was a very small, frisky little lady, with a thin,
rosy face, and a little bobbing bunch of gray curls on each side
of it. She talked very fast, and she talked all the time, so she
accomplished a vast deal of talking in the course of a day, and the
people she happened to be with did a vast deal of listening.

She was talking now, and uncle Jack was listening, with his head
leaning comfortably against a pretty tidy all over daisies in
Kensington work, and so was Letitia, taking cautious little stitches
in her patchwork.