He picked up her suit-case and moved over toward the line. It was an awful long line that night, that reached ’way around past the public desk. In ahead of us was ’most everybody we knew--Abigail Arnold and Mis’ Merriman and Libby Liberty and old rich Mis’ Wiswell with a bag of packages looking like they might be jewelry, every one. And every one of them was talking as hard as they could about the Christmas things they couldn’t get done. “Might as well settle down for a good visit while we’re waiting,” I says to Mis’ Holcomb, and she made her eyebrows sympathize. No sooner was we stood up, neat and in line, than in come three folks that was total strangers to me and to the village as well. One was a young girl around twenty, with eyes kind of laughing _at_ everything, dressed in blue, with ermine on her hat and an ermine muff as big as one of my spare-room pillows, and three big fresh pink roses on her coat. And one was a youngish fellow, some older than her, in a gray cap, and having no use of his eyes--being they were kept right close on the lady in blue. And the other, I judged, was her father--a nice, jolly, private Santa Claus, in a fur-lined coat. They were in a tearing hurry to get to the general-delivery window, but when they saw the line, and how there was only one window for mail and stamps and all, they fell in behind us, as nice as we was ourselves. “Let me take you out and you wait in the car, Alison,” says the youngish man, anxious. “Hadn’t you better, dear?” says her father, careful. “Why, but I love this!” she says. “Isn’t it _quaint_?” And she laughed again. Now, I hate that word _quaint_. So does Mis’ Holcomb. It always sounds to us like last year’s styles. So though her and I had been looking at the three strangers--that we saw were merely passing through in an automobile, like the whole country seems to--with some interest, we both turned our backs and went on visiting and listening to the rest. “I’ve got three more to get presents for,” says Mis’ Merriman in that before-Christmas conversation that everybody takes a hand at, “and what to get them I do _not_ know. Don’t you ever get up a stump about presents?” “Stump!” says Libby Liberty, “I live on a stump from the time I start till I stick on the last stamp.” “I’ve got two more on my list,” Mis’ Wiswell says, worried, “and it don’t seem as if I could take another stitch nor buy another spoon, hat-pin _or_ paper-knife. But I know they’ll send me something, both of them.”