“It is my potato-child.  I want to love it.”

“See you lose no time, then,” said Miss Amanda.

And afterward, Elsie never called the potato it, but always “my child.”

She found a fragment of calico, large enough for a dress and skirt, with enough over, a queer, three-cornered piece, which she pinned about the unequal shoulders for a shawl.  Upon the bonnet she worked for days.

All this sewing was a great joy to her.  Last of all, she begged a bit of frayed muslin from the sweepings for a night-dress.  Then she could undress her baby every night.

She must have heard a tiny tuber-voice, for she said, “Now I can never forget the sound of loving words, and the world is full of joy.”

Elsie had a candle-box in her room, with the cover hung on hinges.  It served the double purpose of a trunk and a seat.  She put her child’s clothes and the scrap of white paper in this box.  In the daytime she let her child sit upon the window-sill so she could see the blue sky; but when the weather grew colder she took her down to the kitchen each morning, lest she should suffer.

Sometimes, Miss Amanda watched her closely.  “She does her work well, but she is a queer thing.  She makes me uneasy,” she thought.

Christmas was coming.  Elsie and her mother had always loved Christmas, and had invariably given some gift to each other.  After their stockings were hung side by side, Christmas Eve, her mother would take her in her lap and tell her the Christmas story.  So now it was a great mercy for Elsie that she had her child to work for.

One day, when she had scrubbed the pantry floor unusually clean, Miss Amanda gave her the privilege of the rag barrel.  This resulted in a new Christmas suit of silk and velvet for baby; and this she made.

When Elsie left “The Home” the matron had given her a little needle-book containing a spool of thread and thimble for a good-by present.  These now came into good play.  She used the lamp shears to cut with.

When all was done the babe looked beautiful, except that it had no stockings.  It had not even legs.  “I’ll make her a wooden leg, and let her be a cripple, then I shall love her all the better.”

But after she had made the leg, and a very good one, too, she hadn’t the heart to break the skin of her child, and push it in.

“I’ll make the stockings without legs,” she said, and so she did.

Elsie was very careful never to let her child see, or mention before her, how busy she was for Christmas.

She felt very sorry for Miss Amanda, and wished she had something to give her, but she could think of nothing except the piece of white paper she found with her potato-child.  The afternoon before Christmas she took it from the candle-box, and smoothed it out upon the cover.  It had some writing upon one side.  Elsie thought it was very pretty writing — it had so many flourishes.  Elsie could not read it, of course, but she hoped Miss Amanda would like it.