Christmas?  What delight could I have in long solicitude and ingenious devices touching a gift for Polly within my means, and hitting the border line between her necessities and her extravagant fancy?  A drove of white elephants would n’t have been good enough for her now, if each one carried a castle on his back.

“—­and so they were married, and in their snug cottage lived happy ever after.”—­It was Polly’s voice, as she closed the book.

“There, I don’t believe you have heard a word of it,” she said half complainingly.

“Oh, yes, I have,” I cried, starting up and giving the fire a jab with the poker; “I heard every word of it, except a few at the close I was thinking”—­I stopped, and looked round.

“Why, Polly, where is the camel’s-hair shawl?”

“Camel’s-hair fiddlestick!  Now I know you have been asleep for an hour.”

And, sure enough, there was n’t any camel’s-hair shawl there, nor any uncle, nor were there any Hindoos at our windows.

And then I told Polly all about it; how her uncle came back, and we were rich and lived in a palace and had no end of money, but she didn’t seem to have time to love me in it all, and all the comfort of the little house was blown away as by the winter wind.  And Polly vowed, half in tears, that she hoped her uncle never would come back, and she wanted nothing that we had not, and she wouldn’t exchange our independent comfort and snug house, no, not for anybody’s mansion.  And then and there we made it all up, in a manner too particular for me to mention; and I never, to this day, heard Polly allude to My Uncle in India.

And then, as the clock struck eleven, we each produced from the place where we had hidden them the modest Christmas gifts we had prepared for each other, and what surprise there was!  “Just the thing I needed.”  And, “It’s perfectly lovely.”  And, “You should n’t have done it.”  And, then, a question I never will answer, “Ten? fifteen? five? twelve?” “My dear, it cost eight hundred dollars, for I have put my whole year into it, and I wish it was a thousand times better.”

And so, when the great iron tongue of the city bell swept over the snow the twelve strokes that announced Christmas day, if there was anywhere a happier home than ours, I am glad of it!

IN THE WILDERNESS

By Charles Dudley Warner

Contents: 
   How I killed A bear
   lost in the woods
   A fight with A trout
   A-hunting of the deer
   A character study (Old Phelps)
   camping out
   A wilderness romance
   what some people call pleasure

HOW I KILLED A BEAR

So many conflicting accounts have appeared about my casual encounter with an Adirondack bear last summer that in justice to the public, to myself, and to the bear, it is necessary to make a plain statement of the facts.  Besides, it is so seldom I have occasion to kill a bear, that the celebration of the exploit may be excused.