"I'm not asleep." Channing's eyes opened blinkingly. "She said they found the squirrel in a hollow down by the chestnut-tree, and the moonlight on the snow--the moonlight--on--the--snow." His head fell back on Claudia's bosom and, with a smile, she nodded to Laine and held out her hand. "The spirit is valiant, but the flesh prevails. I'm so sorry Hope and Channing are out." "I'm not." He drew a cushioned wicker chair close to the fire. "It's been long since I heard a good fairy story. Please don't stop." Dorothea pushed the stool aside and settled herself comfortably in her uncle's lap. "It isn't a fairy story. You don't tell fairy stories at Christmas; they're for summer, when the windows are open and they can hide in the flowers and ride on the wind--the fairies, I mean--but this is Christmas." She twisted herself into a knot of quivering joy and hugged her arms with rapturous intensity. "It's all in my bones, and I'm nothing but shivers. Isn't it grand to have Christmas in your bones? Have you got it in yours?" She held Laine's face between her hands and looked at it anxiously. "Cousin Claudia has it in hers. She and I are just alike. We've been filling stockings to-day for some children Timkins told us about. They live near him, and their mother is sick and their father is dead, and they haven't a bit of money. Channing and I are going to hang our stockings up here before we go to grandmother's, and we're going to hang them up there again. I wish we were going to Cousin Claudia's. Of course, I love to go to grandmother's, but she lives in town and they don't have snow in Savannah; and at Cousin Claudia's they have everything. I mean everything Christmasy like I like. She's been telling us about when she was a little girl." Dorothea's feet twisted around each other and her hands were laid palm to palm as her body swayed backward and forward in rhythmic movement. "They go out in the woods and cut cart-loads of holly and mistletoe and pine and Christmas-trees, and dress the house, and the fires roar up all the chimneys, and they kill the pigs--" Channing sat upright and rubbed his eyes. "They don't kill the pigs at Christmas. She said they kill them when the persimmons get ripe."