And, don’t you know, old Mrs. Peet sent me a Christmas present, too.  A pair of mittens.  She knit them herself.  It was awful nice of her.

I don’t know how big the check was that Miss Katherine’s billionaire brother sent her to spend on the children’s Christmas, but it must have been a corker.  The things she bought with it cost money, and the change it made in the Asylum was Cinderellary.  It was.

She bought a carpet for the parlor, and some curtains for the windows, and a bookcase of books.

For the dining-room she bought six new tables and sixty chairs.  They were plain, but to sit at a table with only ten at it instead of forty, as I’d been sitting for many years, was to have a proud sensation in your stomach.  Mine got so gay I couldn’t eat at the first meal.

To have a chair all to yourself, after sitting on benches so old they were worn on both edges, was to feel like the Queen of Sheba, and I felt like her.  I could have danced up and down the table, but instead I said grace over and over inside.  I had something to say it for.  All of us did.

Besides a present, each of us had a new dress.  It was made of worsted—­real worsted, not calico; and that morning after breakfast, and after everything had been cleaned up, we put on our new dresses and came down in the parlor.

And such a fire as there was in it!

It sputtered and flamed, and danced and blazed, and crackled and roared.  Oh, it knew it was Christmas, that fire did, and the mistletoe and holly and running cedar knew it, too!

At first, though, the children felt so stiff and funny in their new-shaped dresses made like other children’s that they weren’t natural, so I pretended we were having a soiree, and I went round and shook hands with every one.

They got to laughing so at the names I gave them—­names that fit some, and didn’t touch others by a thousand years—­that the stiffness went.  And if in all Yorkburg there was a cheerfuller room or a happier lot of children that Christmas Day than we were, we didn’t hear of it.  I don’t believe there was, either.

The reason we enjoyed this Christmas so was because it was on Christmas Day.

Our celebrations had always been after Christmas, and Christmas after Christmas is like cold buckwheat cakes and no syrup.  Like an orange with the juice all gone.

As for the tree, it was a spanker.  We were dazed dumb for a minute when the parlor doors leading into the sewing-room were opened.  But never being able to stay dumb long, I commenced to clap.  Then everybody clapped.  Clapped so hard half the candles went out.

There wasn’t a soul on the place that didn’t get a present.  This tree was Miss Katherine’s, not the Board’s, and the presents bought with the brother’s money were things we could keep.  Not things to put away and pass on to somebody else next year.  I almost had a fit when I found I had roller-skates and a set of books too.  Think of it!  Roller-skates and books!  The rich brother sent those himself, and I’m still wondering why.