So Donald North learned that perils feared are much more terrible than perils faced. He has a courage of the finest kind, in these days, has young Donald.
A CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE
By J. E. Chamberlin
Having lived all his fourteen years in New York City, making occasional visits to his grandfather’s house in Connecticut, Horace Mason had often sighed for an adventure, and lamented because life in the eastern part of the country is so tame and uninteresting. It had certainly never occurred to him that the chance for a pretty thrilling adventure existed in the quiet country neighborhood in which his grandfather lived.
About a week before Christmas Horace’s mother took him to his grandfather’s farm for the holidays—he had seldom been there in winter.
The weather became remarkably cold and rough, but Horace found pleasure in walking about woods and pastures in rubber boots and ulster, and noting how odd the familiar scenes looked when covered with snow and ice, instead of dressed in green.
A tree was to be set up on Christmas Eve in the old homestead; but Uncle John, on the afternoon of the twenty-third, brought in for the celebration a rather scraggly little red cedar, brown rather than green, which Horace deemed totally unfit for the dignity of a Christmas celebration.
“Why didn’t you get a fir balsam, with a nice even top to it?” Horace asked his uncle.
“Don’t grow around here.”