overspread the tear-stained visage. She had just dropped a handful of the “mixture” into the foot of Ally’s sock, when a soft tap at the door startled her. It was Ellen, and she bore a plate, covered with a napkin, in her hand. “If you plaze, mem--Biddy hopes you won’t be offended, mem--but the children were so disappointed to-day, mem; and when I told her you were going to give them a Christmas, she made so bold as to fry them a few doughnuts. She wouldn’t have taken the privilege, only, seeing Christmas comes but once a year, and it’s good children they are, mem!” “They are, Ellen! Tell Biddy that I am much obliged to her. These are very nice, indeed!” Yet she cried over them when the girl was gone. Her very servants pitied the cruelly-oppressed little ones! “I have been a hard, unsympathizing mother!” she thought, sobbingly. “God forgive me this, my sin!” She wiped away the tears, and resumed her task. “William will think I have lost my senses!” she ruminated, cramming an orange into the leg of the tightly-stuffed sock. “But I can’t help it, if he does!” And, as if invoked by her unspoken thought, her husband, accoutred as I have described, stood before her. “William!” “Emily!” The two detected culprits stared at one another for an instant, in unuttered, because unutterable amazement; then, as the truth dawned upon their minds, they burst into a fit of laughter that threatened to awake the dreamers. “Hush-sh-sh!” said Mrs. Dryden, wiping away the tears of mirth that now hung where bitterer drops had trickled awhile ago, and pointing to the beds, “Let me see what you have been doing?” The prudent economist could not repress a single exclamation of gentle reproof, as she examined the store. “William Dryden! And in these hard times, my dear!” “Christmas comes but once a year, wifie! and then I had to make up for lost time, you know. I’ll tell you how it happened, and then you won’t blame me. I felt badly after tea, and came up to say a kind word to them”--nodding towards the brother and sister--“before they went to sleep, and, that door being ajar, I heard them talking”-- “And listened, as I did at _that_ one!” cried Mrs. Dryden, throwing her arms around his neck, and beginning to cry afresh. “O husband! I have been so miserable ever since! have felt so guilty! Only to think, that I was teaching my children to hate me and to hate their home--making their lives wretched!” “Don’t think of it, dear! After this, there will be peace and good-will among us!” soothed the husband, his own eyes shining suspiciously. “If we have made a mistake, we are ready to correct it. Now, let us see what disposition can be made of this cargo of valuables. And I left a lot of gimcracks--sweet things, you know--down stairs.”