It was my brother Carol's duty always to bring in the Christmas tree. By some strange mix-up of what is and what isn't my brother Carol was dumb--stark dumb, I mean, and from birth. But tho he had never found his voice he had at least never lost his shining face. Even now at eleven in the twilightly end of a rainy Sunday, or most any day when he had an earache, he still let mother call him "Shining Face." But if any children called him "Shining Face" he kicked them. Even when he kicked people, tho, he couldn't stop his face shining. It was very cheerful. Everything about Carol was very cheerful. No matter, indeed, how much we might play and whisper about gifts and tinsels and jolly-colored candles, Christmas never, I think, seemed really _probable_ to any of us until that one jumpy moment, just at the end of the Thanksgiving dinner, when, heralded by a slam in the wood-shed, a hoppytyskip in the hall, the dining-room door flung widely open on Carol's eyes twinkling like a whole skyful of stars through the shaggy, dark branches of a young spruce-tree. It made young Derry Willard laugh right out loud. "Why, of all funny things!" he said. "On Thanksgiving Day! Why, it looks like a Christmas tree!" "It is a Christmas tree," explained my sister Rosalee very patiently. My sister Rosalee was almost always very patient. But I had never seen her patient with a young man before. It made her cheeks very pink. "It _is_ a Christmas tree," she explained. "That is, it's going to be a Christmas tree! Just the very first second we get it 'budded' it'll start right in to be a Christmas tree!" "_Budded?_" puzzled young Derry Willard. Really for a person who looked so much like the picture of the Fairy Prince in my best story-book, he seemed just a little bit slow. "Why, of course, it's got to be _budded_!" I cried. "That's what it's for! That's----" Instead of just being pink patient my sister Rosalee started in suddenly to be dimply patient too. "It's from mother's Christmas-tree garden, you know," she went right on explaining. "Mother's got a Winter garden--a Christmas-tree garden!" "Father's got a garden, too!" I maintained stoutly. "Father's is a Spring garden! Reds, blues, yellows, greens, whites! From France! And Holland! And California! And Asia Minor! Tulips, you know. _Buster's!_ Oh, father's garden is a _glory_!" I boasted. "And mother's garden," said my mother very softly, "is only a story." "It's an awfully nice story," said Rosalee. Young Derry Willard seemed to like stories. "Tell it!" he begged. It was Rosalee who told it. "Why, it was when Carol was born," she said. "It was on a Christmas eve, you know. That's why mother named him Carol!" "We didn't know then, you see"--interrupted my mother very softly--"that Carol had been given the gift of silence rather than the gift of speech."