Adam took off his coat:  he always went at the job of nursing the baby in his shirt-sleeves.  The anxious sweat used to break on his forehead before he was through.  He got its feet to the fire.  “I’m dead sure that much is right,” he used to say.  Jinny put away the bundles, wishing to herself Mrs. Perkins would happen in to see them:  one didn’t like to be telling what they had for dinner, but if it was known accidentally—­You poets, whose brains have quite snubbed and sent to Coventry your stomachs, never could perceive how the pudding was a poem to the cobbler and his wife,—­how a very actual sense of the live goodness of Jesus was in it,—­how its spicy steam contained all the cordial cheer and jollity they had missed in meaningless days of the year.  Then she brought her sewing-chair, and sat down, quite idle.

“No work for to-night!  I’ll teach you how to keep Christmas, Janet, woman!”

It was her first, one might say.  Orphan girls that go about from house to house sewing, as Jinny had done, don’t learn Christmas by heart year by year.  It was a new experience:  she was taking it in, one would think, to look at her, with all her might, with the earnest blue eyes, the shut-up brain behind the narrow forehead, the loving heart:  a contracted tenement, that heart, by-the-by, adapted for single lodgers.  She wasn’t quite sure that Christmas was not, after all, a relic of Papistry,—­for Jinny was a thorough Protestant:  a Christian, as far as she understood Him, with a keen interest in the Indian missions.  “Let us begin in our own country,” she said, and always prayed for the Sioux just after Adam and Baby.  In fact, if we are all parts of God’s temple, Jinny was a very essential, cohesive bit of mortar.  Adam had a wider door for his charity:  it took all the world in, he thought,—­though the preachers did enter with a shove, as we know.  However, this was Christmas:  the word took up all common things, the fierce wind without, the clean hearth, the modest color on her cheek, the very baby, and made of them one grand, sweet poem, that sang to the man the same story the angels told eighteen centuries ago:  “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men.”

Sitting there in the evenings, Adam was the talker:  such a fund of anecdote he had!  Jinny never could hear the same story too often.  To-night there was a bit of a sigh in them:  his heart was tender:  about the Christmases at home, when he and Nelly were little chubs together, and hung up their stockings regularly every Christmas eve.

“Twins, Nelly an’ me was, oldest of all.  When I was bound to old Lowe, it went hard, ef I couldn’t scratch together enough for a bit of ribbon-bow or a ring for Nell, come Christmas.  She used to sell the old flour-barrels an’ rags, an’ have her gift all ready by my plate that mornin’:  never missed.  I never hed a sweetheart then.”

Jinny laid her hand on his knee.

“Ye ‘r’ glad o’ that, little woman?  Well, well!  I didn’t care for women, only Ellen.  She was the only livin’ thing as come near me.  I gripped on to her like death, havin’ only her.  But she—­hed more nor me.”