“I’ve no patience with such actions!” grumbled Mrs. Popham.  “Young folks are so full of notions nowadays that they look for change and excitement everywheres.  I s’pose James Todd thinks it’s a decent, respectable way of actin’, to turn his back on the girls he’s been brought up an’ gone to school with, and court somebody he never laid eyes on till a year ago.  It’s a free country, but I must say I don’t think it’s very refined for a man to go clear off somewheres and marry a perfect stranger!”

Births, marriages, and deaths, however, paled into insignificance compared with the spectacular debut of the minister’s wife as a writer and embellisher of Christmas cards, two at least having been seen at the local milliner’s store.  How many she had composed, and how many of them (said Mrs. Popham) might have been rejected, nobody knew, though there was much speculation; and more than one citizen remarked on the size of the daily package of mail matter handed out by the rural delivery man at the parsonage gate.

No one but Mrs. Larrabee and Letty Boynton were in possession of all the thrilling details attending the public appearance of these works of art; the words and letters of appreciation, the commendation, and the occasional blows to pride that attended their acceptance and publication.

Mrs. Larrabee’s first attempt, with the sketch of Letty at the window on Christmas Eve, her hearth-fire aglow, her heart and her door open that Love might enter in if the Christ Child came down the snowy street,—­this went to the Excelsior Card Company in a large Western city, and the following correspondence ensued: 

     Mrs. Luther Larrabee,
          Beulah, N.H.

     DEAR MADAM:—­

Your letter bears a well-known postmark, for my father and my grandfather were born and lived in New Hampshire, “up Beulah way.”  I accept your verses because of the beauty of the picture that accompanied them, and because Christmas means more than holly and plum pudding and gift-laden trees to me, for I am a religious man,—­a ministerial father and three family deacons saw to that, though it doesn’t always work that way!—­Frankly, I do not expect your card to have a wide appeal, so I offer you only five dollars.

A Christmas card, my dear madam, must have a greeting, and yours has none.  If the pictured room were a real room, and some one who had seen or lived in it should recognize it, it would attract his eye, but we cannot manufacture cards to meet such romantic improbabilities.  I am emboldened to ask you (because you live in Beulah) if you will not paint the outside of some lonely, little New Hampshire cottage, as humble as you like, and make me some more verses; something, say, about “the folks back home.”

Sincerely yours,
REUBEN SMALL.

BEULAH, N.H.

DEAR MR. SMALL:—­