"I'm dog tired," declared Agnes, "but I'd love to start right out and do it all over again!"
"I—I hope the little Maroni baby won't lick all the red paint off that rattle and make herself sick," sighed Tess, reflectively.
"If she does we can buy her a new rattle. It didn't cost but ten cents," Dot rejoined, seeing at the moment but one side of the catastrophe.
CHAPTER XVII
"THAT CIRCUS BOY"
The first Christmas since the Kenway girls had "come into" Uncle Peter's estate was bound to be a memorable one for Ruth and Agnes and Tess and Dot.
Mother Kenway, while she had lived, had believed in the old-fashioned New England Christmas. The sisters had never had a tree, but they always hung their stockings on a line behind the "base-burner" in the sitting-room of the Bloomingsburg tenement. So now they hung them in a row by the dining-room mantelpiece in the old Corner House.
Uncle Rufus took a great deal of interest in this proceeding. He took out the fire-board from the old-fashioned chimneyplace, so as to give ingress to Santa Clans when the reindeers of that good saint should land upon the Corner House roof.
Dot held to her first belief in the personal existence of Saint Nick, and although Tess had some doubts as to his real identity, she would not for the world have said anything to weaken Dot's belief.