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“A story, children; so soon after Christmas, too! Let me think, what shall it be?”

“O yes, mamma,” uttered three children in chorus.

Mrs. Livingston sat looking into the fire that flamed on the broad hearth so long, that Carl said, by way of reminder that time was passing: “An uncommon story.”

Then up spoke Bessie: “Mamma, something, please, out of the real old time before much of anybody ’round here was born.”

“As long off as the Indians,” assisted young Dot.

“Ah yes; that will do, children. I will tell you a story that happened in this very house almost a hundred years ago. It was told to me by my grandmother when she was very old.”

There was a grand old lady, Mrs. Livingston, at the head of this house then. She loved her country very much indeed, and was willing to do anything she could to help it, in the time of great trouble, during the war for independence. My grandmother was a little girl, not so old as you, Bessie. Her name was Lorinda Grey, and her home was in Boston. The year before, when British soldiers kept close watch to see that nothing to eat, or wear, or burn, was carried into Boston, Mr. Grey contrived to get his family out of the city, and Lorinda, with her brother Otis, was sent here. Afterward, when Boston was free again, the two children were left because the father was too busy to make the long journey after them.

Altogether, more than a dozen children belonging in some way to the Livingstons had been sent to the old house. The family friends and relatives gave the place the name “Fort Safety,” because it lay far away from the enemy’s ships, and quite out of the line where the soldiers of either army marched or camped.

The year had been very full of sorrow and care and trouble and hard work; but when the time for Christmas drew near, this grand old Mrs. Livingston said it should be the happiest Christmas that the old house had ever known. She would make the children happy once, whatever might come afterward, and so she set about it quite early in the fall. One day the children (there were more than a dozen of them in the house at the time) found out that the great room at the end of the hall was locked. They asked Mrs. Livingston many times when it meant, and at last she told them that one night after they were in bed and asleep, Santa Claus appeared at her door and asked if he might occupy that room until the night before Christmas. She told him he might, and he had locked the door himself, and said “if any child so much as looked through a crack in the door that child would find nothing but chestnut burs in his stocking.” Well, the children knew that Santa Claus meant what he said, always, so they used to run past the door every day as fast as they could go and keep their eyes the other way, lest something should be seen that ought not to. Before the day came every wide chimney in the house was swept bright and clean for Santa Claus.

Aunt Elise, a sweet young lady, lived here then. She was old Mrs. Livingston’s daughter, and she told the children that she had seen Santa Claus with her own eyes when he locked the door, and he said that every room must be made as fine as fine could be.

After that Tom and Richard and Will and Philip worked away as hard as they could. They gathered bushels and bushels of ivy, and a mile or two of ground-pine, and eight or ten pecks of bitter-sweet, and stored them all in the corn granary, and waited for the day. Then, when Aunt Elise set to work to adorn the house, she had twenty-four willing hands to help, beside her own two.