The next day the mother’s place was empty in the nursery. “Mrs. Morton was with her husband in the library,” Travers told us. Later on we heard she was driving. Just as I was putting Reggie, half asleep, in his cot, she came up to wish the children good-night, but she did not stay with us ten minutes. I remarked that she looked very ill and exhausted.
“Oh, I am only a little tired,” she returned, hurriedly; “I have been paying calls all the afternoon, trying to make up for my idle week, and the talking has tired me. Never mind, it is all in the day’s work.” And she nodded to me kindly and left the room.
(To be continued.)
CHRISTMAS GIFTS.
ith the approach of Christmas and Christmas gifts, the cares of the girl members of a large family may be said to arrive at a crisis. There is no girl so friendless or so heartless that there is no one she loves or wishes to remind of that love at this season, while there are many surrounded by affectionate relations and true friends, whose love they warmly return, and whom they wish to please with a gift, and yet have but a small sum at command, and must think carefully over its division.
How many anxious calculations have to be made, what knitting of smooth brows, what hasty arithmetic on stray scraps of paper, what self-denial in personal matters to increase the little store, and then, when the materials are bought, what secret work is carried on behind father’s chair, should he happen to be awake, and in this and that out-of-the-way nook of the house, so that the all-important, and generally extremely apparent, secret is not divulged until the Christmas or New Year’s morning!
All honour to this secrecy, this planning and patient work! It is the true spirit of present-giving; and let not any of our readers despise it as childish; rather let them remember that that which costs no time, no thought, no self-sacrifice is but of little value in the eyes of affection, and pleases only where the gift is valued for itself, and not for the giver. The girl who can walk into a shop and select the first handsome article in it for mamma, and pay for it from an amply-supplied purse, neither awakens in herself or her mother the same holy feelings that are excited when baby works an impossible kettle-holder “all by herself,” and which she “bided” out of the pennies given her for sweeties.
Admiring and sympathising as we do with girls who are generous-minded and do not count labour and time when anxious to please, we have brought together in this paper, with the idea of helping them, several useful and pretty articles that can be made without any great expense.