The Romance of a Christmas Card | Page 3

him in Racine, Wisconsin!"
Mrs. Larrabee lighted her lantern, closed the door behind her, and
walked briskly down the lonely road that led from the parsonage at
Beulah Corner to Letitia Boynton's house. It was bright moonlight and
the ground was covered with light-fallen snow, but the lantern habit
was a fixed one among Beulah ladies, who, even when they were not
widows or spinsters, made their evening calls mostly without escort.
The light of a lantern not only enabled one to pick the better side of a
bad road, but would illuminate the face of any male stranger who might
be of a burglarious or murderous disposition. Reba Larrabee was not a
timid person; indeed, she was wont to say that men were so scarce in
Beulah that unless they were out-and-out ruffians it would be an
inspiration to meet a few, even if it were only to pass them in the
middle of the road.
There was a light in the meeting-house as she passed, and then there
was a long stretch of shining white silence unmarked by any human
habitation till she came to the tumble-down black cottage inhabited by
"Door-Button" Davis, as the little old man was called in the village. In
the distance she could see Osh Popham's two-story house brilliantly

illuminated by kerosene lamps, and as she drew nearer she even
descried Ossian himself, seated at the cabinet organ in his shirt-sleeves,
practicing the Christmas anthem, his daughter holding a candle to the
page while she struggled to adjust a circuitous alto to her father's tenor.
On the hither side of the Popham house, and quite obscured by it, stood
Letitia Boynton's one-story gray cottage. It had a clump of tall cedar
trees for background and the bare branches of the elms in front were
hung lightly with snow garlands. As Mrs. Larrabee came closer, she set
down her lantern and looked fixedly at the familiar house as if
something new arrested her gaze.
"It looks like a little night-light!" she thought. "And how queer of Letty
to be sitting at the open window!"
Nearer still she crept, yet not so near as to startle her friend. A tall brass
candlestick, with a lighted tallow candle in it, stood on the table in the
parlor window; but the room in which Letty sat was unlighted save by
the fire on the hearth, which gleamed brightly behind the quaint
andirons--Hessian soldiers of iron, painted in gay colors. Over the
mantel hung the portrait of Letty's mother, a benign figure clad in black
silk, the handsome head topped by a snowy muslin cap with floating
strings. Just round the corner of the fireplace was a half-open door
leading into a tiny bedroom, and the flickering flame lighted the heads
of two sleeping children, arms interlocked, bright tangled curls flowing
over one pillow.
Letty herself sat in a low chair by the open window wrapped in an old
cape of ruddy brown homespun, from the folds of which her delicate
head rose like a flower in a bouquet of autumn leaves. One elbow
rested on the table; her chin in the cup of her hand. Her head was
turned away a little so that one could see only the knot of bronze hair,
the curve of a cheek, and the sweep of an eyelash.
"What a picture!" thought Reba. "The very thing for my Christmas card!
It would do almost without a change, if only she is willing to let me use
her."
"Wake up, Letty!" she called. "Come and let me in!--Why, your front

door isn't closed!"
"The fire smoked a little when I first lighted it," said Letty, rising when
her friend entered, and then softly shutting the bedroom door that the
children might not waken. "The night is so mild and the room so warm,
I couldn't help opening the window to look at the moon on the snow.
Sit down, Reba! How good of you to come when you've been
rehearsing for the Christmas Tree exercises all the afternoon."

[Illustration]
II
"It's never 'good' of me to come to talk with you, Letty!" And the
minister's wife sank into a comfortable seat and took off her rigolette.
"Enough virtue has gone out of me to-day to Christianize an entire
heathen nation! Oh! how I wish Luther would go and preach to a tribe
of cannibals somewhere, and make me superintendent of the
Sabbath-School! How I should like to deal, just for a change, with
some simple problem like the undesirability and indigestibility
involved in devouring your next-door neighbor! Now I pass my life in
saying, 'Love your neighbor as yourself'; which is far more difficult
than to say, 'Don't eat your neighbor, it's such a disgusting habit,--and
wrong besides,'--though I dare say they do