These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily.  Then Bob proposed: 

“A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears.  God bless us!”

Which all the family reechoed.

“God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

XXVII.  CHRISTMAS IN SEVENTEEN SEVENTY-SIX*

From “A Last Century Maid and Other Stories for Children,” by A.H.W.  Lippincott, 1895.

ANNE HOLLINGSWORTH WHARTON

“On Christmas day in Seventy-six,
Our gallant troops with bayonets fixed,
To Trenton marched away.”

Children, have any of you ever thought of what little people like you were doing in this country more than a hundred years ago, when the cruel tide of war swept over its bosom?  From many homes the fathers were absent, fighting bravely for the liberty which we now enjoy, while the mothers no less valiantly struggled against hardships and discomforts in order to keep a home for their children, whom you only know as your great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, dignified gentlemen and beautiful ladies, whose painted portraits hang upon the walls in some of your homes.  Merry, romping children they were in those far-off times, yet their bright faces must have looked grave sometimes, when they heard the grown people talk of the great things that were happening around them.  Some of these little people never forgot the wonderful events of which they heard, and afterward related them to their children and grandchildren, which accounts for some of the interesting stories which you may still hear, if you are good children.

The Christmas story that I have to tell you is about a boy and girl who lived in Bordentown, New Jersey.  The father of these children was a soldier in General Washington’s army, which was encamped a few miles north of Trenton, on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River.  Bordentown, as you can see by looking on your map, if you have not hidden them all away for the holidays, is about seven miles south of Trenton, where fifteen hundred Hessians and a troop of British light horse were holding the town.  Thus you see that the British, in force, were between Washington’s army and Bordentown, besides which there were some British and Hessian troops in the very town.  All this seriously interfered with Captain Tracy’s going home to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife and children.  Kitty and Harry Tracy, who had not lived long enough to see many wars, could not imagine such a thing as Christmas without their father, and had busied themselves for weeks in making everything ready to have a merry time with him.  Kitty, who loved to play quite as much as any frolicsome Kitty of to-day, had spent all her spare time in knitting