LOTTIE’S CHRISTMAS TREE

“There’s no use wishing for anything away out here in the woods,” said Lottie fretfully, rocking violently back and forth by the side of the bed.

“No, of course we couldn’t have one, but I should like to see a Christmas tree before I die. It must be splendid!”

And poor, sick May turned wearily on her pillow.

“You’re not going to die, May,” said Lottie impatiently, “and I hope you’ll see lots of Christmas trees if you don’t this year. It’s your turn to go to Aunt Laura’s next.”

May sighed.

“I’m too tired, Lottie. I never shall go.”

“Of course you’re tired,” said Lottie in the same fretful tone; “nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to read just lying on your back, week after week, in this old log house. It’s enough to make anybody sick. I s’pose it’s awful wicked, but I think it’s just too bad that we two girls have to live in this mean old shanty, with nobody but stupid old Nancy!”

“Oh, Lottie,” said the sick girl anxiously, “don’t forget father, and what a comfort we are to him.”

“You are, you mean,” interrupted Lottie.

“No, I mean you. I’m an expense and care to him; but what could he do without you? And remember,” she went on softly, “how he hated to bring us to this lonely little place, and wanted to put us in school, and leave us, but we begged him”

“Yes, I remember,” said Lottie regretfully, “and I am wicked as I can be to talk so; but thinking about Aunt Laura’s tree, it did seem too bad you couldn’t have one, too. You have so few pleasures.”

“Oh, I have lots of pleasures!” cried May eagerly. “I love to lie here and look out into the woods, the dear, sweet, quiet woods, and remember the nice times we used to have before I was sick; and I like”

“You like some dinner by this time, I guess,” said Nancy, coming in with her dinner nicely served on a tray.

Lottie got up, went into the next room, threw an old shawl over her head, and stepped out of the side door into the woods, for the house had not been built long, and all the clearing was on the other side.

Though it was winter, it was not very cold, and the woods were almost as attractive as in summer.

Walking a few rods, Lottie sat down on her favorite seat, a fallen tree trunk covered with moss.

“I declare, it’s too bad!” she began to herself. “I believe May is dying because it’s so stupid here. I could ’most die myself. I wonder if I couldn’t do something to amuse her. Couldn’t I buy something, or make something,” she went on, slowly turning over in her mind all her resources. “Let me see, I have two dollars left. I wish I could buy her a set of chessmen! She and father play so much. Wait! wait!” she cried excitedly, jumping up and dancing around; “I have it! I can make her a set like Kate Selden’s, or something like it, I know! Oh, dear! won’t that be splendid! How delighted she will be! But where’ll I get the figures?”

She sat down again more soberly, and fell into a brown study.

“My two dollars will buy enough china dolls, I guess, and I’ll get Aunt Laura to send them to me by mail.”

This was a bright thought, and the more she thought of it, the greater grew her plan. She remembered several things she could make, and before she went into the house, she even ventured to dream of a tree.

That night a mysterious letter was written, the two dollars slipped in, sealed, and directed, ready to give to the postman, an old man who passed every day with mail for the village.

Never did ten days seem so long to Lottie as that particular ten days which passed before she got her answer. Every day, at the postman’s hour, she ran up to the road and waited for him, all the time planning the wonderful things she would do. At last, one day, the old man stopped his horse, fumbled in his saddlebags, and brought out a package directed to her.

She seized it, and ran off to open her treasure. What did the package contain? Nothing but twenty-eight china dolls, some silver and gilt paper, and some bits of bright silk.

“Auntie has got everything!” she exclaimed joyfully; “and now I can go right to work.”

Now the log house had but four rooms, the living-room, where they ate, and where old Nancy cooked at a big cave of a fireplace, in which logs were burning from fall to spring; the girls’ room, where May lay, which was also warmed by a big fireplace; father’s room, and a room in the attic for Nancy.

Lottie could not work in the cold, nor in May’s room, so she established herself in a warm corner of the living-room, far enough from Nancy’s dull eyes, and near a window. Day after day she worked, making excuses to May for leaving her so much alone, and hiding her work before her father came in at night.

I will tell you how she made the set of chessmen. First she hunted up a smooth, thin board, from which she cut, with her father’s saw, a square piece about twenty inches square. The middle of this board she laid out in blocks with a pencil and ruler, careful to make them exactly perfect. The blocks were two inches square and there were eight each way; in fact, it was a copy of the chessboard her father had made.

These squares she covered with gilt and silver paper alternately, covering the joinings with strips of very narrow gilt bordering. The edge of the board she covered with a strip of drab-colored cloth she found in the piece-trunk.

The board being finished, and it was really very pretty, she had next to make the chessmen. For these she used the china dolls, the tallest of which was three inches high. Half of the dolls were white and the other half black; the white to wear blue and white, the black ones scarlet and drab.

The dressing was a work of art, for she wished to make them look like the characters they represented. She looked through the picture-books in the house to see how kings and queens and knights and bishops were dressed. Pictures of kings and queens she found in a geography, knights in a volume of Shakespeare, and a bishop in an odd number of an old magazine.

Then she went to work. The pawns were dressed as pages, the kings and queens in flowing robes, with crowns of gilt or silver paper, glued on, the knights in coats of mail, strips of silver paper laid over one another like the shingles on a roof, the bishops in long gowns, with mitre on the head, all in the two colors of their respective sides. The four castles were made of pieces of gray sandpaper, glued into cylinder shape, with battlement-shaped strips around the top; when glued on their standards, they looked like little stone castles.

When they were all dressed, and it took many days and much contriving, Lottie found that few of them would stand up, and those which possessed the accomplishment were very tottlish, and fell down at the slightest provocation.

That would never do, so she set her wits to work to provide standards.

She took an old broom handle, and sawed it into thin slices.

When she had thirty-two of these slices, she covered them neatly with pieces of old black broadcloth, glued on, over top, edge, and all. Then she dipped the feet of each china personage into the hot, stiff glue, and held it in place till the glue set.

They would stick nicely, and stand up as straight as any chessmen.

Then she drew the long robes into folds, just touched with glue, and festooned to the standard so as not to get out of place.

When the whole set was done, Lottie was delighted; and, indeed, they were extremely pretty.

Every night, when May and her father would get out the old set, made of button moulds, with the name printed on with ink, Lottie would think what a surprise there would be.

But she was not done with plans.

May had a picture, a delicate pencil-sketch of her mother, the only likeness they had. It was the sick girl’s treasure. Too careful of it to allow it to hang on the wall and get soiled, she kept it in an old book under her pillow, and to take it out and look at it every day was her delight. Now Lottie planned to make a frame for this treasure.

On pretense of looking at it, she took its dimensions, and then went to work. Cutting a piece of cardboard of the right size, she proceeded to cover it with little bunches of grasses she had dried in the summer, standing up in vases so that they drooped gracefully. At the top, where the stems of the grasses met, she placed a bunch of bitter-sweet berries, the brilliant red and orange just the needed bit of color to perfect the whole.

It was laid away in a chest with the chessmen, ready to receive the picture.

And now she began to plan for the adornment of the tree.

Candles were the greatest anxiety, but with the help of Nancy, she made a few large ones into twenty as neat and pretty little “dips” as you ever saw.

Walnuts she ornamented with gilt bands and loops to be hung by; apples, the reddest and whitest, were similarly prepared; tiny cornucopias, made of white letter paper trimmed with bits of gilt, filled with popped corn and meats of butternuts nicely picked out; dainty baskets made of old match-boxes, covered with gay paper, and with festooned handles; gorgeous pink and white roses of paper; tiny cakes of maple sugar, delicious sticks and twists of molasses candy; dainty drop cakes and kisses smuggled into the oven on baking-day, all were secreted in the wonderful chest in the attic.

At last came the day before Christmas, and Lottie took the axe and went into the woods, for this woods-girl could not only bake cakes, dress dolls, and saw broomsticks, but she could even chop down a tree, if it was small.

She found a beautiful spruce tree, which had evidently been growing all these years on purpose for a Christmas tree, so straight it stood, and so wide and strong were its branches.

Cutting it down, and dragging it home over the snow, Lottie presented herself at the kitchen door, to the astonished eyes of Nancy.

“Now, Nancy, don’t you say a word to May. I’m going to surprise her.”

“’Deed ’n I should think you’d surprise her, could she see you dragging that big log into the house!”

“Well, you help me in with it, for I don’t want to break its branches.”

“All on my clean floor!” cried Nancy, in dismay.

“Yes, quick!” said Lottie; “it won’t muss, you’ll see.”

Nancy helped her, and the tree yielded to fate and four strong arms, and went in.

It did look big, and when Lottie stood it up in a tub, it nearly touched the wall. Around the trunk of the tree, to steady it, she packed sticks of wood till it stood firm. Then she covered the whole, tub, wood, and floor around, with great sheets of green moss, which she had pulled out from under the snow the day before.

She got the tree in early in the morning, and every moment she could steal from May through the day she spent in filling it, hanging on her treasures, fastening her candles by sticking large pins up through the small branches, and standing the candles on them.

The chessboard stood prominently on the moss at the foot of the tree, and the frame, with its picture, hung from one branch.

When her father came home, he found supper served, as a Christmas eve treat, Lottie said, in May’s room, and adroitly he was kept out of the mysterious room.

When he was finishing his last cup of tea, and was talking with May, Lottie slipped out, lighted a long taper, and in five minutes had the tree all ablaze with light.

“Father,” she said, quietly opening the door, “will you bring May out to her Christmas eve?”

“What!” said father.

But mechanically he took in his arms the light form of his daughter, and followed Lottie. At the door he stood transfixed, and May could not speak or breathe for wonder.

That one moment paid Lottie for all her hard work, but Nancy’s “Do tell!” as she peeped over their shoulders and saw the illuminated tree, broke the spell.

Father broke out with tears in his eyes, “Why, Lottie!” and May cried ecstatically: “How wonderful! how lovely! is it a dream? is it fairies?”

“No, May,” Lottie whispered, coming up softly behind her, “it’s only a Christmas tree, and it’s yours!”

“Mine! and you made it?” exclaimed May, understanding at once Lottie’s intense occupation of the last month.

“Who helped you, my daughter?”

“No one, father,” said Lottie.

“Well, it’s wonderful, really wonderful. How could you do it all alone? I can’t understand it! What a little, smothered volcano you must have been all these weeks!”

“I could hardly keep from telling,” said Lottie, with happy eyes.

But now May asked to be carried nearer, and each treasure was examined. The ingenious chessmen were praised, and the frame brought a shower of happy tears from May.

Then there was a surprise for father, for Lottie had found time to make him a nice, warm muffler, and May had knit him a pair of mittens, which she now brought out. And Nancy was not forgotten, for Lottie had made her an apron, and May had made her a tatting collar. Neither was Lottie neglected, for May had netted her a beautiful new net.

And father now drew out of his pocket a letter which he had received from Aunt Laura that morning, on opening which, two new ten-dollar bills were found, presents from Aunt Laura to the girls, “to buy some keepsake with,” the letter said.

“And I was so cross, thinking I should not have any Christmas,” said May repentantly.

“And I was so sad, thinking how different would have been my daughters’ Christmas if their dear mother had been with us,” said father softly.

“And you, Lottie like a dear, old darling as you are,” said May, giving her a spasmodic hug, “were all the time working away with all your might that I might have the most splendid Christmas tree! I don’t believe Aunt Laura’s is half so pretty!”

“It must be fun to dress up a tree yourself,” said Kristy, when the story was ended.

“And still more,” said her mother, “to get it up, as Lottie did, out of almost nothing. It’s easy enough to go out and buy enough to cover a tree, but it’s a very different affair to make the presents one’s self.

“Another unusual Christmas celebration that I have heard about was even more strange than Lottie’s, though several people took part in getting it up. It took place in a baggage-car,” went on Mrs. Crawford.

“In a baggage-car?” said Kristy.

“Yes; attached to a train that was snowed up in Minnesota one winter. It was the time that Ethel Jervis was ill, you remember, and her mother took her to Minnesota for her health.”

“She took Harry, too, didn’t she?” asked Kristy.

“Yes; she couldn’t leave him very well, so he was with them.”

“Tell me about it!” said Kristy.