“I don’t see what Sis wants to string this stuff all over the house for, just because it happens to be Christmas!” grumbled Tommy, as he sat on a big stone and idly kicked at a pile of beautiful ground-pine and fragrant balsam boughs. “It’s the best day for skating we’ve had yet, and here I am missing a whole morning of it, and so tired that most likely I won’t feel like going this afternoon!” Now Tommy knew perfectly well that if his mother said that he could go, nothing could keep him away from the pond that afternoon. He was a little tired, perhaps, but not nearly so tired as he tried to think he was. Gathering Christmas greens was work of course. But when you come right down to it, there is work about almost everything, even skating. The chief difference between work and pleasure is the difference between “must” and “want to.” When you _must_ do a thing it becomes work; when you _want_ to do a thing it becomes pleasure. Right down deep inside, where his honest self lives, Tommy was glad that there was going to be a green wreath in each of the front windows, and that over the doors and pictures there would be sweet-smelling balsam. Without them, why, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmasy at all! And really it had been fun gathering those greens. He wouldn’t admit it, but it had. He wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It was only that it had to be done just when he wanted to do something else. And so he tried to feel grieved and persecuted, and to forget that Christmas was only two days off. He sat on the big gray stone and looked across the Green Meadows, no longer green but covered with the whitest and lightest of snow-blankets, across the Old Pasture, not one whit less beautiful, to the Green Forest, and he sighed. It was a deep, heavy sigh. It was the sigh of a self-made martyr. As if in reply, he heard the sharp voice of Chatterer the Red Squirrel. It rang out clear and loud on the frosty air, and it was very plain that, whatever troubles others might have, Chatterer was very well satisfied with the world in general and himself in particular. Just now he was racing along the fence, stopping at every post to sit up and tell all the world that he was there and didn’t care who knew it. Presently his sharp eyes spied Tommy. Chatterer stopped short in the middle of a rail and looked at Tommy very hard. Then he barked at him, jerking his tail with every syllable. Tommy didn’t move. Chatterer jumped down from the fence and came nearer. Every foot or so he paused and barked, and his bark was such a funny mixture of nervousness and excitement and curiosity and sauciness, not to say impudence, that finally Tommy laughed right out. He just couldn’t help it.