"It was here you stood to sing," the dignified doctor would remark, or, "Was ever anything lovelier than when you stood there with those roses, watching me set the broken bones?"
"And how you frightened me when you flashed your eyes on me so suddenly."
"It is a good place," the doctor would say; "here we found each other, and here began the love that has blessed our lives."
"And here I found my Aunt Katherine," Esther was fond of adding.
[THE DAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS.]
———
"WHY, Auntie! What a quantity of lunch you are putting up. You don't expect me to take my Christmas dinner on the cars, do you?"
"Stranger things than that have come to pass, even though you should," Aunt Ruth said, tucking in another half-dozen biscuits. "Massachusetts is a long way off, and Christmas is pretty near at hand. You'll have sharp work to get through by Christmas, I'm thinking. The connections will have to be very good, and no set-backs on the way. That don't always happen in winter, you know. Trains will be behind time, or there 'll be a bridge down, or something. Then as you get on toward the East there will be snow-storms—snow you up for a week, maybe—better stay till after Christmas yet."
"Aunt Ruthie, don't! Please don't prophesy such terrible things; I shall get on all right, I am sure. Good-by, dear own auntie!" And the young girl wound her arms about the elder woman's neck, and laid her brown head close to the gray one.
"Good-by, dearie!" Aunt Ruth said in broken tones. "The Lord bless you and keep you—and see here, child, I'll tuck these two little books into your basket, and some more biscuits, then if you should have to spend a week on the way, you will have something to feed soul and body both."
A last loving look into Aunt Ruth's eyes, and Marian sprang into a light wagon by Uncle Eli's side, and two ponies trotted off over the smooth country road. The frosty air, the crackle of dry leaves and twigs, the morning sun, the fragrant cedars, and the flutter of gay-winged birds, made the heart of this girl, whose eye and ear were open to all sweet influences of nature, sing for joy—the mere joy of being—on this glorious morning. And truly a winter morning in the poetical, picturesque southwest, with its balmy airs, green fields, and gay birds, at Christmas time, can but seem to a New Englander the presage of that morning when all things shall be made new.