"It wasn't my secret! I'd have been a cur to butt in on Louise's fun."
Quietly Mrs. McGregor glanced up from the sea of delicate blue gauze foaming about her.
"A ready tongue is a gift of silver, but a silent one is a treasure of pure gold," observed she quaintly.
With the Harlings safely out of their difficulties Christmas, as Carl jestingly observed, was free to approach and approach it did with a speed incredible of belief. A big blizzard a week before it, which transformed the suburban districts into a wonderland of beauty, merely worked havoc however in Baileyville, causing muddy streets and slippery pavements, and wrecking the skating in the park.
"Snow doesn't seem to be made for cities," remarked Mrs. McGregor in reply to Carl's lamentations. "It is an old-fashioned institution that belongs to the past. Here in town there is neither a place for it nor does it do an atom of good to anybody unless it is the unemployed who hail the work it brings."
"I hate the snow," wailed Timmie. "It isn't snow, anyway; it's just slush."
"Ah, laddie, you should see one of the snowstorms of the old country!" protested his Scotch mother reminiscently. "Then you would not say you hated the snow. It turned everything it touched white as a Tartary lamb."
"What's a Tartary lamb, Mother?" inquired Tim with interest.
"A Tartary lamb? Ask your big brother; he goes to school."
"I never heard of a Tartary lamb, Ma," flushed Carl.
"Mary had a little lamb," began Nell, who had caught the phrase.
"So she did, darling," laughed her mother as she picked up the child and kissed her, "and its fleece was white as snow, too, for the song says so; but it wasn't a Tartary lamb, dearie. It was just a common one."
"What is a Tartary lamb, anyway, Ma?" Mary demanded.
Mrs. McGregor paused to put a length of silk into her needle.
"Long ago," began she, "before there were ships and trains, to say nothing of automobiles and aeroplanes people had to stay at home in the places where they happened to be born. Of course they could go by coach or on horseback to a near-by city, but they could not go far; nor indeed did they think of going because they did not know there was anywhere to go. Nobody did any traveling in those days and as a result there were no maps or travel books to set you thinking you must pack up your traps to-morrow and start for some place you never had seen. But by and by the compass was invented, larger and better ships came to be built, and men got the idea the world was round instead of flat (as they had at one time supposed), a discovery that comforted vastly the timid souls who had always been afraid of falling off the edge of it. Therefore, when it was at last proved that should you sail far, far away your ship, instead of dropping off into space, would circle the great ball we live on and come home again, some of those who were brave, adventurous, and had money enough set out on voyages to see what there was to be seen in other lands than those they had been brought up in. Frenchmen thought it would be a grand thing to discover new countries for France; Englishmen wanted new territory for England. So it was all over the world. Thus this one and that one began to travel."