So she was all ready to laugh when Jim asked if the little boys in the big cities wore muzzles like the dog he had seen in town this morning, and when her mother asked if she would take pie, her "yes" was emphatic; for a world of trouble had rolled off her heart, and she was her hopeful self again.

After the dinner-dishes were washed, and the baby trotted away to dream-land, Debby stole up to her room to look over the dress she was to wear in the evening; as the ruffles in neck and wrists were fresh, she found there was nothing for her to do but brush it and lay it out on the bed. Still she lingered with an undefined feeling that it was Christmas-day everywhere else, and if she could only——

All the week, while seeing and hearing about the presents the school-girls were making, she had been full of vague longings to do something for some one; but she had neither money nor material, and was not at all sure how a present from her would be received by her father and mother. "Perhaps I might make a pin-ball," she thought, beginning to search through the old chest of drawers that stood at the foot of her bed.

In the lowest drawer were odds and ends that she had been collecting for years, and from one corner, carefully wrapped up, she drew a square of black cloth in which was worked in wool a bunch of rose-buds, pink, white and yellow, surrounded by their green leaves. A lady who had boarded with them the last summer had begun it for a pair of slippers, but after making two or three mistakes on it, had given it to Debby.

"I wonder if I could make it into a cushion for mother?" soliloquized Debby, turning it around in her red fingers. "Mrs. Williams said old flannel was good to stuff them with, and I can bind it with——" she leaned forward and picked among her bunch of faded ribbons. "There is nothing nice enough," she sighed; "but this green will have to do."

DEBBY AND THE ICE-CREAM
[SEE PAGE 227.]

Wrapping herself in a quilt she sat down on the rounded top of a hair-covered trunk, close to the frosty window, and cutting the cloth in the shape of a diamond, she sewed it together like a bag, filled it with flannel, and hurriedly stitched on the faded green ribbon as a binding.

These rosebuds were a wonderful work of art to Debby, and one of her great treasures; it would have been a "perfectly lovely cushion," she thought, if the binding had only been new and the silk with which she stitched it green instead of blue; and it was so delightful to make presents. Next year she would have a present for every one in the house; she wondered why she had never thought of it before.

"And He feeleth for our sadness,
And He shareth in our gladness,"