"You expect a New Year's gift to-morrow, I presume, Frank."
"Yes, Mother, you always give us a New Year's gift, you know. Will you let us sit up till the clock strikes twelve to-night?"
Their mother promised that they should, and added, "I have been thinking of a New Year's gift for you, Frank, that I am not quite sure you will like. I will tell you what it is, and if you do not like it, you will say so honestly, I trust."
"What is it, Mother?"
"You know the little room I call my closet. It has a window in it, and contains some shelves with books on them. I propose to give you that closet, with all the books I shall leave in it, for your own. In it are a desk and a chair. From the window, you look directly, you know, upon the pine grove. In this little room, you may study and write and read and think also, as much as you please."
Frank could scarcely hear his mother finish, for delight at the thought. "All my own? the books, the desk, the nice old-fashioned chair and the closet itself? Why, Mother, I never should have believed you would have given it to me for my own. There is nothing I should like so well in the world. Shall I have the Shakespeare, and the Johnson, and the Classical Dictionary, and the Sir Charles Grandison, and all the old poets, and those French books in it, and the Homer and the Virgil too?"
"Yes, my son, I think I need not ask you to promise to lend them to me when I wish to borrow them. I have a great affection for this closet, Frank, and therefore I give it to you. If the walls could speak, they could tell you a great deal of your mother's history."
"I wish they could; I shall sit there a great deal, and I should like to hear all they have to say."
"As I have promised you to let you sit up till the new year comes in, I will tell you something now of what they would say. You know that this is the house in which I was born, so that this closet knew me from a child. Many a time, when I was a little girl, has my mother shut me up in it for refusing to obey her. It was gentle treatment shutting me up in this closet; had it not been called a punishment, I never should have thought it one. In summer time, the whispering of the wind through the pine trees rebuked my bad temper, and seemed to say, 'Hush, Alice! Peace! Be still.' I always came out better than I went into it. When I was nine years old, my father gave me this closet for my own use altogether. Many of the books that are in it now were in it then, and the same desk and chair stand there to this day. My father had just built on to his house the addition which gave him the library which I now use; his law books and papers, &c., required better accommodation; and, from that time, the closet became mine. He gave it to me, as I do to you, for a New Year's gift; and this is one reason why I love to give it to you for the same purpose. It is a very dear and sacred spot to me, Frank, this closet, and I think you will like to hear something of its history."
"Yes, indeed I shall, Mother," said Frank.