all the delight of the season was in the gifts of their hands and in the night's merry-making, and in the joy of keeping holiday. Here, as Calliope had said, Christmas, begun in a stocking, was ending in a candle. And yet it was Star of Bethlehem night, the night of Him who "didn't mention givin' _things_ at all." X LONESOME.--I Calliope and I were talking over the Proudfit party, as I had grown to like to talk over most things with her, when I said something of two of the guests whom I did not remember before to have seen: a little man of shy gravity and an extremely pretty girl who, if she looked at any one but him, did so quite undetected. "That's Eb Goodnight," Calliope replied, "him of the new-born spine. Wasn't it like the Proudfits to ask them?" And, at my question: "Some folks," Calliope said, "has got spines and some folks hasn't. But what I say is, nobody can tell which is which. Because now and then the soft-spine' kind just hardens up all in a minute same as steel. So when I meet a stranger that sort o' sops along through life, limp and floppy, I never judge him. I just say, 'You look some like a loose shutter, but mebbe you can fair bang the house down, if you rilly get to blowin'.' It was that way with Eb Goodnight. "I donno how it is other places. But I've noticed with us here in Friendship--an' I've grown to the town from short dresses to bein'-careful-what-I-eat--I've often noticed't when folks seems not to have any backbone to speak of, or even when they go 'round sort o' crazy--they's usually some other reason, like enough. Sensitive or sick or lonesome, or like that. It was so with Eb--an' it was so with Elspie. Elspie, though, was interestin' on account o' bein' not only a little crazy, but rill pretty besides. But Eb, he was the kind that a sign-board is more interestin' than. An' yet--" With that she paused, looking down some way of her own thought. I knew Calliope's "an' yet." It splendidly conceded the entire converse of her argument. "Eb come here to Friendship," she went on, "less public than Elspie did. Elspie come official, as an inmate o' the county house. Eb, he sort o' crep' in town, like he crep' everywhere else. He introduced himself to me through sellin' needles. He walked in on me an' a two-weeks ironin' one mornin' with, 'Lemme present myself as Ebenezer Goodnight, sewin' needles, knittin' needles, crochet hooks an' shuttles an' anything o' that,' an' down he set an' never opened his mouth about his needles again. Eb was real delicate, for an agent. He just talked all the time about Friendship an' himself. 'The whol' blame' town's kin,' s'e; 'I never see such a place. _Every_body's kin, only just me. Air you,' he ask' me wistful, 'cousin' of 'em all, too?' "'Mis' Sprague that's dead was connected up with me by marriage an' Mis' Sykes is my mother's secunt cousin,' I owned up.' "'That's it again,' s'e, sighin'. 'I'm the odd number, dum it,' he says sorrowful.