By evening the younger members of the group had gone,—Fred Jr. and his family back to Lincoln, Donald and Wentworth to Omaha, while Katherine was off somewhere with Jimmie Buchanan. But the others, in the early dusk of the Christmas twilight, gathered in the parlor with the homely coal-burner and the lovely floor lamp, with Abbie’s crude painting of the prairie and Margaret’s exquisite one, with the what-not and the blue plush album and the tidy on the back of the patent-rocker.

“There was one Christmas we had, Mother,” Mack said, “that I always remember more than the others. I can see the things yet,—my old brass cornet, a big wooden horse made out of logs, a tree that looked . . . well, I’ve never seen a tree since look so grand. Where in Sam Hill did you raise all the things in those days?”

“I think I know which one you mean,” Abbie was reminiscent. “It was the year after the grasshoppers. Well, my son, your father and I made all of those things out of sticks and rags and patches and love.”

It brought on a flood of reminiscences.

“Remember, Mack, the Sunday afternoon we were herding hogs on the prairie and that Jake Smith that kept the store at Unadilla, came along with his girl in a spring wagon, and threw a whole handful of stick candy out in the grass for us?” Mrs. Frederick Hamilton Baker, well-known artist and club woman of Lincoln, was speaking.

“Do I? I can see them yet, red and white striped,—and looking as big as barber-poles to me. I wondered how any one in the world could be that rich and lavish,” Mackenzie Deal, a vice-president of one of the Omaha banks, was answering.

“And do you remember, John, how scared you were . . . the time we chased the calf and you grabbed it by the tail when it ran by you and the tail was frozen and came off in your hands?”

When they had all laughed at the recollection, Isabelle put in, “But I’ll bet he wasn’t as scared as I was once, . . . the time a man came to the door and told Father he was drawn on the jury. You all stood around looking solemn, and I took a run for Mother’s old wardrobe and hid in behind the clothes and cried.”

“Why . . . what did you think?” They were all asking.

“Well, I knew ‘jury’ had something to do with law and jails and penitentiaries. And I had heard of ‘hung,’ ‘quartered’ and ‘drawn’ so the inference was that Father was going to be hung in the penitentiary.”

“I remember once when I wasn’t scared but mad.” It was Grace’s contribution. “It was when Aunt Regina came to help Mother take care of Grandma. I was modestly effacing myself under the dining-room table and she scooped me out with a sprightly, ‘So this is little Grace.’ Then she took me on her lap and put her arms around me and pressed me to her bosom and apparently forgot me, while she and mother verbally married off and buried all the relatives over my head.”