* * * * *

And so you didn't know what a castle in Spain was? Why, you have lived
in one. In one! you have lived in a hundred, and if you were older you
would have lived in a thousand. Why, everybody lives in castles in
Spain sometimes. Let me see how to tell you about it. You know your
elder sister that young Pettengill comes to see so often, and whom you
hate so because you have to go to bed early? Well, your sister lives
in a castle in Spain. She has had it papered and painted, and moved
to another street to be near her dearest girl friend so as to make
visiting convenient, and she has had the front yard fixed with flowers,
particularly those he likes, and has had a door-plate put on the castle
door with a name on it, CLARENCE PETTENGILL, in large letters. I
remember when your father married your mother forty years ago, that
she lived in a castle in Spain, and to her eyes your father was clad
in shining armor and wore long plumes in his hat, and to those same
eyes was a Hero of high degree. Why, even the old gentleman who is
writing this to you, has lived in those castles, and as he looks back
at them now with their bare walls and broken windows and tumbled down
appearance generally, he often wonders how he came to build them. Some
times, more especially at Christmas time, he gets on an old, and now
uncertain steed called Memory, and rides back to all the castles he
has lived in. So beautiful when he built them, so brightly painted by
Hope and Pride and Ambition and all the other celebrated artists of
that day; now so dingy and wrecked that you would hardly know them,
and some clear faded out of sight. The castle, little one, that you
are now living in has over the front door in big letters CHRISTMAS,
and from its window you see such lots of fun that you will never have,
such lots of presents that you will never get, and such a lot of
imagining that you will never see realized. After this week is over,