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.”

“Well, they’re killed and you eat them Christmas.  They put a little one on the table with an apple in its mouth.  And they pick out the fattest turkeys and ducks and geese and chickens; and they go to the smoke-house and punch and poke the hams and things; and the oysters come from the river; and Mammy Malaprop comes up from the gate, where she lives now, and helps make the cakes and the, pies and plum-puddings and beaten biscuits; and Cousin Claudia says when she was a little girl Mammy Malaprop always gave her some of the Christmas cake to bake in egg-shells.  I wish I could see somebody make a cake.  And Christmas Eve they make egg-nog, and Uncle Bushrod makes the apple toddy two weeks before.”  She turned to her uncle.  “Why don’t you go down there, Uncle Winthrop?  I bet you’d get Christmas in your bones if you did.”

“I am very sure of it.”  Laine fixed Dorothea more firmly on his lap.  “There is only one reason in the world why I don’t go.”

“What’s that?  We’re going away, and you will be all alone if you don’t.  Can’t he come, Cousin Claudia?  He’d love it.  I know he would.”

“I don’t.”  Claudia moved her chair farther from the firelight.  “Christmas at Elmwood would be punishment for a city man.  We are much too primitive and old-fashioned.  He would prefer New York.”