A real Christmas baby was not to be lightly named.

Some folks mistakes all they see for all there is.

It was not long after sunrise, and Stephen Waterman, fresh from his dip in the river, had scrambled up the hillside from the hut in the alder-bushes where he had made his morning toilet.

Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.

One cannot see callers, answer the telephone, go to luncheons or dinners, visit the dentist or shoemaker, address charitable organizations in or from a bed; therefore a bed, in my experience, is simply bristling with ideas.

To let blessed babies go dangling and dawdling without names, for months and months, was enough to ruin them for life.

Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.