By the side of this package was one for her father. She was glad to turn to it, for it was not so splendid and marvellous that it dumfounded her. His package had a bottle in it.
"I believe it's made of forget-me-nots," said Ruth. She took it into her hands, and found it was woven like basket work, a sort of wicker bottle. Only the stems of the plants were so intertwisted that the blossoms all came to the outside. But both stems and blossoms were perfectly transparent, so you could see straight through into the inside. "E,S,S,E,N,C,E of C,H,E,E,R,F,U,L,N,E,S,S. To be taken eternally." This was written beneath, and Ruth spelled the two big words slowly. "I know what that means," she continued. "The Judge is going to give father some more sense. For essence, of course, is only another kind of sense. Oh! I forgot the essence man. He brings us peppermint and vanilla and cologne. We season things, and make ourselves smell good. Now, that's what you've sent to father, isn't it? Essence of Cheerfulness. You want him to season things with cheerfulness, don't you, and make himself and all the rest of us fragrant? And he'll do it. He's always saying that we ought to be cheerful. But what kind of stuff is it?" and Ruth tipped up the bottle to taste of its contents. She smacked her lips and beamed with delight. "I do believe it's a spirit. Father says, you can't see spirit but you can feel it. I can't see anything but light in that bottle, but I can feel something all through me. I must dance a little, I feel so good. Oh, dear me! that's the way people sometimes act when they've drunk from bad bottles. But I can't help it." She caught her skirts in each hand, and airily waltzed up and down the room.
"I must see if the mantle is here," she suddenly exclaimed. "How strange that I've just thought of it!" And then she stopped to look at the baby's present.
"It can't be that the Judge's mantle would go into such a little package as that." So Ruth remarked as she took the tiny thing in hand. It was tied with the most brilliant sunset that eyes ever saw. The streamers attached to the bow were much bigger than the package itself. When Ruth undid it, and held the singular object before her eyes, it seemed to grow large and long. It was truly the Judge's mantle. As she shook it out, and let its folds drop down to the floor, the pictures fairly beamed with glory. "Silver threads among the gold," exclaimed the child, as the beauteous garment flashed its splendors into her eyes. For the warp was the pure gold of character, while the woof was the fine silver of influence. And they were woven into a fabric of surpassing richness. Then this matchless weaving was covered with fairest embroidery. Every color that imagination ever conceived appeared upon the garment. There was the white light of truth, the red of sacrifice, the purple of royalty, the greens of fresh life, the pink of propriety, the red that you see in a green blackberry, the blue of a minister's Monday, and true blue, auburn from a child's head, hazel from a child's eyes, black as thunder cloud, pale as death, the lemon of lemon ice, orange from orangeade, and a great many others. And these colors were worked into words, flowers of rhetoric, scenes indeed, pictures of love, kindness, wisdom, and peace. It was also adorned with quite a number of gems of poetry, and it had a pearl of great price to fasten it at the throat.
The first thing which Ruth did was to try it on, but it dragged on the floor. It occurred to her that the baby must wait until he was grown up before it fitted him. Still, she tried it on the baby. No sooner did she wrap it around him than it seemed to shrink to his size.
"Why, we can use it for a winter coat," she said. And the "Little Judge," who had fallen asleep before the fire, where he had crawled with Turk and the cat, cooed and laughed when the mantle was wrapped about him, seeming to feel that it was the very thing that would make him happy and comfortable. All the time that Ruth was handling the magic thing, it continued to throw off little points of light and countless mites of color, and these settled down on the furniture and carpet and the curtains and the walls and the ceiling, until the room was like a palace studded with twinkling, shifting, radiant stars; and every present on the piano was shining and scattering light, the air being filled with music, and Ruth was wild with delight and excitement.
The next thing was to carry the gifts to the stockings where they belonged. Wherever she went, there was the brightness of noonday, so she never had a fear. Even the closet with the skeleton in it did not make her tremble. Beginning with father and mother, she visited every stocking, and put each gift in its proper place; then she carried the baby to bed, and left Turk and Satan snuggled up together in front of the fire; and then it seemed to her that she floated away in a sea of light; and then mounting upon the wings of the wind, she suddenly met the sand man who pushed her into the Land of Nod.
The last that she remembered was blue sky, gems of poetry, rainbows, shooting stars, flowers of rhetoric, strains of music, sunsets, closets, stockings, Christmas cheer, sunshine, and a great many other things, all standing around the type-writer in her father's study, telling the machine what to say, and begging that everything might be set down in a book and live forever.