The twelve scholars walked two by two up to Dame Louisa’s front door, and knocked.  They were very quiet and spoke only in whispers because they knew Dame Louisa was nervous, and did not like children very well.  Indeed it was a great cross to her that she lived so near the school, for the scholars when out in their own yard never thought about her nervousness, and made a deal of noise.  Then too she could hear every time they spelled or said the multiplication-table, or bounded the countries of Africa, and it was very trying.  To-day in spite of their efforts to be quiet they awoke her from a nap, and she came to the door, with her front-piece and cap on one side, and her spectacles over her eyebrows, very much out of humor.

[Illustration:  TWO BY TWO.]

“I don’t know where you’ll find the hen,” said she peevishly, “unless you go to the White Woods for it.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said the children with curtesies, and they all turned and went down the path between the dead Christmas-trees.

Dame Louisa had no idea that they would go to the White Woods.  She had said it quite at random, although she was so vexed in being disturbed in her nap that she wished for a moment that they would.  She stood in her front door and looked at her dead Christmas-trees, and that always made her feel crosser, and she had not at any time a pleasant disposition.  Indeed, it was rumored among the towns-people that that had blasted her Christmas-trees, that Dame Louisa’s scolding, fretting voice had floated out to them, and smote their delicate twigs like a bitter frost and made them turn yellow; for the real Christmas-tree is not very hardy.

No one else in the village, probably no one else in the county, owned any such tree, alive or dead.  Dame Louisa’s husband, who had been a sea-captain, had brought them from foreign parts.  They were mere little twigs when they planted them on the first day of January, but they were full-grown and loaded with fruit by the next Christmas-day.  Every Christmas they were cut down and sold, but they always grew again to their full height, in a year’s time.  They were not, it is true, the regulation Christmas-tree.  That is they were not loaded with different and suitable gifts for every one in a family, as they stood there in Dame Louisa’s yard.  People always tied on those, after they had bought them, and had set them up in their own parlors.  But these trees bore regular fruit like apple, or peach, or plum-trees, only there was a considerable variety in it.  These trees when in full fruitage were festooned with strings of pop-corn, and weighed down with apples and oranges and figs and bags of candy, and it was really an amazing sight to see them out there in Dame Louisa’s front yard.  But now they were all yellow and dead, and not so much as one pop-corn whitened the upper branches, neither was there one candle shining out in the night.  For the trees in their prime had borne also little twinkling lights like wax candles.