It was all wonderful. The three little girls would have thought Christmas had come in the middle of the summer, if they had known anything about Christmas, which they did not. Yet they were very good and pretty little girls, and they had lovely rivers to play in, and a great splendid mountain to look at all their lives. Of course there were some boys,—three of them; and they were about as much interested in the wonderful dolls as were their little sisters. That is, they were until the lady took out of the bag which the guide carried a new jack-knife with two shiny blades; then the boys’ eyes got very shiny too. None of them had ever owned a knife. Their father had one, and when he was at home the boys used to borrow it to whittle the ends of sticks into brushes to kindle the fire with; for there was never a scrap of paper with which to start a fire. You can imagine how those three boys felt when the lady gave each of them a new knife! You can imagine how they felt, I say; but they could not have told you. They really didn’t know themselves; for they had never felt that way before. What are you asking?—are we _never_ coming to Little Mitchell? Yes; but we must have supper first. What has supper to do with it? Oh, everything. For now that the lady is found, the whole story turns on the supper. If it hadn’t been for the supper, the lady would not have found Little Mitchell, and you would never have known a thing about him. You see, the people who lived in the cabin had nothing to eat but corn-pone, which is a kind of coarse cornbread baked in the ashes; for they had no stove,—nothing but a big stone fireplace to do their cooking in. There was nothing but corn-pone and fried cabbage there to eat. So when the lady came, the father took his gun (he had just got home from the saw-mill) and went out to get some meat for supper. After a little while he came back with a large gray squirrel; and pretty soon they all had a nice hot supper of corn-pone, fried cabbage, and squirrel-pie. Now squirrel-pie is really no worse than chicken-pie or veal-pie or mutton-pie; but it sounds worse. And of course nobody knew that the squirrel that went into the pie was a poor little mother bunny with a nestful of young babies. I should like to tell you how the lady spent the night in the log-cabin, which had only two rooms for its eleven occupants, counting the lady and her guide who were not expected, and not counting the very littlest baby and the next biggest baby and the three-year old baby, who were all tucked away somewhere—under one of the beds, I think—before supper. [Illustration: THE LOG SCHOOLHOUSE “The schoolhouse stood on the bank of a little river.” (Page 17)] I say I should like to tell you about that strange night; only, of course, you would not listen, with Baby Mitchell waiting up in his tree to be rescued.