long cold. Always it seems to me the longest month in the year.
It is so far to another Christmas!

[Illustration: Mother.]

To say that Ribe was an old town hardly describes it to readers
at this day. A town might be old and yet have kept step with time.
In my day Ribe had not. It had never changed its step or its ways
since whale-oil lanterns first hung in iron chains across its
cobblestone-paved streets to light them at night. There they hung
yet, every rusty link squeaking dolefully in the wind that never
ceased blowing from the sea. Coal-oil, just come from America, was
regarded as a dangerous innovation. I remember buying a bottle
of "Pennsylvania oil" at the grocer's for eight skilling, as a
doubtful domestic experiment. Steel pens had not crowded out the
old-fashioned goose-quill, and pen-knives meant just what their name
implies. Matches were yet of the future. We carried tinder-boxes
to strike fire with. People shook their heads at the telegraph.
The day of the stage-coach was not yet past. Steamboat and railroad
had not come within forty miles of the town, and only one steam
factory--a cotton mill that was owned by Elizabeth's father. At
the time of the beginning of my story, he, having made much money
during the early years of the American war through foresight in
having supplied himself with cotton, was building another and larger,
and I helped to put it up. Of progress and enterprise he held an
absolute monopoly in Ribe, and though he employed more than half
of its working force, it is not far from the truth that he was
unpopular on that account. It could not be well otherwise in a town
whose militia company yet drilled with flint-lock muskets. Those
we had in the school for the use of the big boys--dreadful old