distribution of his pack? The wing pews on one side of the pulpit had
been floored over and the Christmas Tree stood there, triumphant in
beauty, while the gifts strewed the green-covered platform at its
feet.

How gay, how audacious, how witty was Santa Claus! How the village had
always misjudged John Trimble, and how completely had John Trimble
hitherto obscured his light under a bushel. In his own proper person
children avoided him, but they crowded about this Santa Claus,
encircling his legs, gurgling with joy when they were lifted to his
shoulder, their laughter ringing through the church at his droll
antics. A sense of mystery grew when he opened a pack on the pulpit
stairs, a pack unfamiliar in its outward aspect to the Committee on
Entertainment. Every girl had a little doll dressed in fashionable
attire, and every boy a brilliantly colored, splendidly noisy, tin
trumpet; but hanging to every toy by a red ribbon was Mrs. Larrabee's
Christmas card; her despised one about the "folks back home."

[Illustration: HANDS THAT TREMBLED, AS EVERYBODY COULD SEE]

The publishers' check to the minister's wife had been accompanied by a
dozen complimentary copies, but these had been sent to Reba's Western
friends and relations; and although the card was on many a
marble-topped table in Beulah, it had not been bought by all the
inhabitants, by any means. Fifteen cents would purchase something
useful, and Beulah did not contain many Croesuses. Still, here the
cards were,--enough of them for everybody,--with a linen handkerchief
for every woman and every man in the meeting-house, and a dozen more
sticking out of the pack, as the people in the front pews could
plainly see. Modest gifts, but plenty of them, and nobody knew from