After a prayer was offered up, familiar addresses, full of kindness and encouragement, were made to the children, interspersed with singing and other appropriate exercises.  These were continued for an hour.  At their close the children were taken up stairs to the two long school-rooms, in which their dinner was to be served.  Here were Christmas trees loaded with presents, wreaths of evergreen on the walls and ceilings, and illuminated texts hung here and there, and everything was provided to make the day’s influence as beautiful and pleasant as possible to the poor little ones gathered in from cheerless and miserable homes.

Meantime, the carvers had been very busy at work on the forty turkeys—­large, tender fellows, full of dressing and cooked as nicely as if they had been intended for a dinner of aldermen—­cutting them up and filling the plates.  There was no stinting of the supply.  Each plate was loaded with turkey, dressing, potatoes that had been baked with the fowls, and a heaping spoonful of cranberry sauce, and as fast as filled conveyed to the tables by the lady attendants, who had come, many of them, from elegant homes, to assist the good missionary’s wife and the devoted teachers of the mission-school in this labor of love.  And so, when the four hundred hungry children came streaming into the rooms, they found tables spread with such bounty as the eyes of many of them had never looked upon, and kind gentlemen and beautiful ladies already there to place them at these tables and serve them while eating.

It was curious and touching, and ludicrous sometimes, to see the many ways in which the children accepted this bountiful supply of food.  A few pounced upon it like hungry dogs, devouring whole platefuls in a few minutes, but most of them kept a decent restraint upon themselves in the presence of the ladies and gentlemen, for whom they could not but feel an instinctive respect.  Very few of them could use at fork except in the most awkward manner.  Some tried to cut their meat, but failing in the task, would seize it with their hands and eagerly convey it to their hungry mouths.  Here and there would be seen a mite of a boy sitting in a kind of maze before a heaped-up dinner-plate, his hands, strangers, no doubt, to knife or fork, lying in his lap, and his face wearing a kind of helpless look.  But he did not have to wait long.  Eyes that were on the alert soon saw him; ready hands cut his food, and a cheery voice encouraged him to eat.  If these children had been the sons and daughters of princes, they could not have been ministered to with a more gracious devotion to their wants and comfort than was shown by their volunteer attendants.

Edith, entering into the spirit of the scene, gave herself to the work in hand with an interest that made her heart glow with pleasure.  She had lost sight of the little boy in whom she had felt so sudden and strong an interest, and had been searching about for him ever since the children came up from the chapel.  At last she saw him, shut in and hidden between two larger boys, who were eating with a hungry eagerness and forgetfulness of everything around them almost painful to see.  He was sitting in front of his heaped-up plate, looking at the tempting food, with his knife and fork lying untouched on the table.  There was a dreamy, half-sad, half-bewildered look about him.