Four minutes later she felt her way down-stairs and opened the kitchen door into a room filled with steam, and the peculiar smell of scalded fowls. "There's seven to do," her mother said, bending over the brass kettle on the stove to draw from it a dripping turkey. "Yours are all scalded. Go to work." Debby buttoned on a large apron, seated herself with a tin pan in her lap containing a turkey, and then began quickly to pluck off its feathers, laying them to dry on a religious newspaper spread on the table beside her. Mrs. Blanchard soon sat down at the other side of the table, and began to pick and talk as fast as fingers and tongue would allow. What did possess Mr. Blanchard to change his mind, and give them so much extra trouble, she could not conceive; and selling them to Tate, too, when he might have made a quarter of a cent more a pound if he had let Morris have them. And then those hoop-poles! He might have made she didn't know how much if he had taken her advice, and kept them a week longer. As for the potatoes, they had turned out so small, and the corn was so short in the ear, that the land only knew where the money to get them all something to wear was to come from. Not that _she_ cared for dress, for hadn't she worn the same bonnet and shawl to church until she was ashamed to show her face there? As for the sewing society, she was a master hand at cutting and planning, and she could go as well as not, too, now that Debby was quite old enough to take care of the baby, and get the supper ready for her father and the boys; but not a step was she going to sit next Mrs. Williams with her black silk, and Mrs. White with her handsome alpaca, although their husbands' farms were no larger than Mr. Blanchard's; and for the life of her she could not understand why _she_ should not dress as well when she worked twice as hard as they did. To all of which Debby listened with a sinking heart and great sobs in her throat, wondering why they should be such an unhappy family when every one around them appeared so glad. Did it really make people so happy, this Christmas-day that they talked so much about in Sunday-school? That was a beautiful hymn that they sung last Sunday; she repeated one verse softly to herself while the stream of her mother's talk ran on: "Jesus is our childhood's pattern, Day by day, like us, he grew; He was little, weak and helpless, Tears and smiles, like us, he knew; And he feeleth for our sadness, And he shareth in our gladness." With a comforted feeling she pushed back her hair with her feathery hand, heartily wishing that all the people who ate their turkeys would be comfortable, and have clothes to wear and go to sewing societies whenever they liked. The clock ticked loudly, the fire died away while Mrs. Blanchard enlarged upon the trials of her life, and, despite the refrain in her heart-- "And he feeleth for our sadness, And he shareth in our gladness"--