In dismay they turned out their pockets. All those vessels of gold and vessels of silver were lost—lost in that last mad rush. All but the shallow, gold-colored saucer in the Vicar’s hand. They looked at it enviously, but honor kept them silent. To the Vicar belonged the spoils. “I don’t see what good they were, anyhow,” began the Lieutenant morosely. “’Good’?” mimicked the Head Captain, enraged. “’Good’? Why, didn’t we _steal_ ’em?” Slowly they took off their uniforms and hid them under the back piazza. Slowly the occasion faded into the light of common day; objects lost their mystery, the barn and the tool-house imperceptibly divested themselves of all glamour. It was only the back yard. The Head Captain and the Lieutenant threw themselves down under the pear tree again and fell into a doze. The Vicar, grasping her treasure, stumbled up the back stairs and took an informal nap on the landing. It must have been at this time that the gold-colored saucer slipped from her hand, for when she woke on the sofa in the upper hall, it was nowhere about. The same hands that had transferred her to that more conventional resting-place, bathed and attired her for supper, and though two hours ago she would, as a pirate, have exulted in her guilty possession, somehow as a neat, small person in pink ribbons she felt shy at approaching the subject, and ate her custard in silence. [Illustration: “_A neat small person in pink ribbons._”] Some time during the hours of the next long morning, as she played quietly on the piazza, she caught her mother’s voice, slightly raised to reach the cook’s ear: “Why, I suppose it is. I shouldn’t wonder, Maggie. I suppose the child picked it up somewhere. Did you hear that, Fred, about Mr. Van Tuyl’s best harness? All scattered through half the back yards on Winter Street. All those brass ornaments, and parts of the very side-lamps, too. Fortunately they found it all. Take that piece, Maggie, and give it to the man when you see him.” The Vicar sighed. Just then she felt, with the poet, that home-keeping hearts are happiest. BOBBERT’S MERRY CHRISTMAS “And _that’s_ how I came to be born in a manger!” Bobbert concluded. The baby nodded, her mouth a comprehending bud, her eyes big with interest. “Nuv’ ’tory! Tell Babe nuv’ ’tory!” she demanded. “So then the wise men came. They were shepherds. They came with their flocks-by-night——” “Huh?” “Flocks-by-night, I say. It was something they had. They brought me some Frank’s incense——” “Unka F’ank! _Goo-ood_ Unka F’ank!” “_Will_ you keep still? It wasn’t that Frank.” “_Warum nicht?_” inquired the baby, with a startling intelligibility. Her German, for some reason best known to herself, was as distinct as her English was garbled. “Because it isn’t, silly. Uncle Frank isn’t a wise man—he’s a p’fessor in college. And they brought me——” “Look here, Bobbert, what on earth are you talking about?”