"Do you find it so?" said Ebenezer, dryly. "Read, please." At noon Ebenezer walked home alone through the melting snow. And the Thought that he did not think, but that spoke to him without his knowing, said:-- "Winning a puzzle--Two Dollars and a half. She never told me she tried to earn a little something that way." VIII "If we took the day before Christmas an' had it for Christmas," observed Tab Winslow, "would that hurt?" "Eat your oatmeal," said Mis' Winslow, in the immemorial manner of adults. "Would it, would it, would it?" persisted Tab, in the immemorial manner of youth. "And have Theophilus Thistledown for dinner that day instead?" Mis' Winslow suggested with diplomacy. On which Tab ate his oatmeal in silence. But, like adults immemorially, Mis' Winslow bore far more the adult manner than its heart. After breakfast she stood staring out the pantry window at the sparrows on the bird box. "It looks like Mary Chavah was going to be the only one in Trail Town to have any Christmas after all," she thought, "that little boy coming to her, so." He was coming week after next, Mary had said, and Mis' Winslow had heard no word about it from anybody else. When "the biggest of the work" of the forenoon was finished, Mis' Winslow ran down the road to Ellen Bourne's. In Old Trail Town they always speak of it as running down, or in, or over, in the morning, with an unconscious suiting of terms to informalities. Ellen was cleaning her silver. She had "six of each"--six knives, six forks, six spoons, all plated and seldom used, pewter with black handles serving for every day. The silver was cleaned often, though it was never on the table, save for company, and there never had been any company since Ellen had lost her little boy from fever. Having no articulateness and having no other outlet for emotion, she fed her grief by small abstentions: no guests, no diversions, no snatches of song about her work. Yet she was sane enough, and normal, only in dearth of sane and normal outlets for emotion, for energy, for personality, she had taken these strange directions for yet unharnessed forces. "Mercy," observed Mis' Winslow, warming her hands at the cooking stove, "you got more energy." "... than family, I guess you mean," Ellen Bourne finished. Ellen was little and fair, with slightly drooping head, and eyebrows curved to a childlike reflectiveness. "Well, I got consider'ble more family than I got energy," said Mis' Winslow, "so I guess we even it up. Seven-under-fifteen eats up energy like so much air." "Hey, king and country," said Ellen's old father, whittling by the fire, "you got family enough, Ellen. You got your hands full of us." He rubbed his hands through his thin upstanding silver hair on his little pink head, and his fine, pink face took on the look of father which rarely intruded, now, on his settled look of old man.