Every day in the year has the same number of hours, but some days skim past like an automobile and some creep like a snail at a gallop. The days between Thanksgiving and Christmas are of the motor-car variety. There is so much to do, and to think of, that people can scarcely believe the clock. Lucy and Dora were as busy with their plans as were the grown people. Dora made several pretty calendars for gifts. She hemmed a duster for Miss Chandler and another for Mother. She thought Miss Chandler would find use for a duster in her three rooms, especially a cream-white one, feather-stitched all around in blue. Mrs. Merrill suggested this gift and she thought Dora took a good while to make it. She did not know that Dora made a second one, precisely like the first. She made it under Mother’s very nose, and Mother never saw it. Lucy and Dora both thought this was very funny, and could not help laughing, but it never occurred to Mrs. Merrill that the duster Dora was working on was not always the same one. On Christmas eve there was a church service. Miss Page asked her class to come early. This was an important occasion because the mite-boxes for the hungry children in other countries were to be collected. Mr. and Mrs. Merrill were going with the children, but they would sit in the back of the church. Lucy and Dora were to sit with their class. The class was to sit in pew twenty-eight. There had been many things to do that afternoon, and nobody looked out until they started for church. When the door shut behind the Merrill family, everybody was surprised. Christmas came on a moonlight night that year, but in addition to the moon, at almost every house the porch light was shining, and the ordinary electric bulbs had been unscrewed and red ones substituted. All up and down the streets shone the pretty red lights. “Oh, Mother!” said Lucy. “I wish our house had one. But it is only gas, and none at all on the porch.” Mrs. Merrill thought a minute. The red lights did look pretty. In the front windows of the brown cottage hung Christmas wreaths but there was no light behind them. “Wait for me a bit,” she said, and she went back into the cottage. Lucy and Dora wondered what she was going to do. A group of young people went by. They were singing softly and Father began to sing with them. When Father was a young man, he used to belong to the choir. “It came upon the midnight clear, That glorious song of old, Of angels bending near the earth, To touch their harps of gold.” _What_ was Mother doing? She had lighted the lamp on the parlor table, but what was keeping her now? “Still through the cloven skies they come, With peaceful wings unfurled: And still their heavenly music floats O’er all the weary world.”