With that Kettle was ruthlessly seized, his clothes stripped off him, and he was soused in a washtub of warm water, while Aunt Tulip, with a scrub-brush, and soft soap of her own manufacture, scrubbed him from head to foot, including his woolly head. Kettle, who had rather dreaded the unusual experience, enjoyed it before he got through. Then Aunt Tulip, putting a nightgown of her own on him, covered him up in a little pallet she had made upon the floor of her own room, next the kitchen, and in two minutes Kettle had passed into the dreamless sleep of a tired little boy. Aunt Tulip began to examine the boy's worn clothes. They were very ragged, and his shoes quite beyond help. But clothes, however ragged, may be washed and mended. So Aunt Tulip, who had worked hard all that day and every day, set herself the task of having something decent for Kettle to put on Christmas morning. She toiled at the washtub while Betty, afar off, was dancing, and the Colonel had long since gone to his bedroom on the ground floor. After Kettle's poor clothes were washed and ironed, they were hung before the kitchen fire to dry, and then Aunt Tulip, getting out her big work-basket and brass thimble and putting on her horn spectacles, began the work of mending Kettle's rags. She patched and darned industriously, and at last, with a sigh of profound satisfaction, she folded up and laid upon a chair Kettle's clothes, including his jacket and trousers, neatly washed and mended and decent. Nothing could be done with his shoes, except to put some shoe-polish on them, and this she did. The Christmas stars looked down kindly upon the poor negro woman toiling for one of God's poor, and the Christmas angels wafted a benediction upon her humble head. When her labor was over, Aunt Tulip lay down to rest for a couple of hours. She knew well enough when Betty would return, and the fire had to be started up in Betty's room, and, after old Whitey had been put in the stable, Uncle Cesar must have his hot coffee and corn pone. For Aunt Tulip, like many of her humble sort, was a minister of kindness to all around her. It was six o'clock, but still the world was all inky blackness when the wheels of the rockaway crunched before the door of Holly Lodge. The fire in Betty's room had been stirred into a cheering blaze, and Aunt Tulip was ready to help her out of her simple evening gown. "I declar, Miss Betty," said Aunt Tulip, as she unhooked Betty, "how some folks kin let a chile go as raggety as that air boy, I doan' see." Betty's mind came back from officers and university students to Kettle. "We must try and get him some decent clothes, Mammy," answered Betty, Aunt Tulip having been Betty's mammy in her baby days. "Anyhow," continued Aunt Tulip, "the boy has got sumpin' decent fur Chris'mus mornin'. I done washed his clo'es an' mended 'em up the bes' I could." "And were you washing and ironing and mending all this Christmas night?" asked Betty.