You may have noted the fact that it is a person's virtues as often as his vices that make him difficult to live with.

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.

Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.

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

Please drop a note to the clerk of the weather, and have a good, rousing snow-storm -- say on the twenty-second. None of your meek, gentle, nonsensical, shilly-shallying snow-storms; not the sort where the flakes float lazily down from the sky as if they didn't care whether they ever got here or not, and then melt away as soon as they touch the earth, but a regular business-like whizzing, whirring, blurring, cutting snow-storm, warranted to freeze and stay on!

There is a kind of magicness about going far away and then coming back all changed.

A real Christmas baby was not to be lightly named.