CHAPTER IV.
A CHRISTMAS GIFT.
The pioneer sunbeam of next Christmas morning rattled over the Dunderbunk hills, flashed into Richard Wade's eyes, waked him, and was off, ricochetting across the black ice of the river.
Wade jumped up, electrified and jubilant. He had gone to bed feeling quite too despondent for so healthy a fellow. Christmas Eve, the time of family meetings, reminded him how lonely he was. He had not a relative in the world, except two little nieces,—one as tall as his knee, the other almost up to his waist; and them he had safely bestowed in a nook of New England, to gain wit and virtues as they gained inches.
"I have had a stern and lonely life," thought Wade, as he blew out his candle last night, "and what has it profited me?"
Perhaps the pioneer sunbeam answered this question with a truism, not always as applicable as in this case,—"A brave, able, self-respecting manhood is fair profit for any man's first thirty years of life."
But, answered or not, the question troubled Wade no more. He shot out of bed in tip-top spirits; shouted "Merry Christmas!" at the rising disk of the sun; looked over the black ice; thrilled with the thought of a long holiday for skating;
