just over his stomach; "I wish 't was a cold night every day, then we could have molasses tea all the time, don't you, Cherry?"
"Mm," said Cherry, too full of the anticipated treat for articulate speech.
"There's nothing like it to warm up your insides,"; said March; "mother's a brick to let us get up for it. She would n't, you know, if father were at home."
"My tummy's told," piped May, frantically patting her chest in imitation of Budd, and all the children shouted to see the wee four-year-old maiden trying to manufacture a shiver in the glow of the cheerful fire.
Mrs. Blossom had never told her recipe for her "hot molasses tea;" but it had been famed in the family for more than a generation. She had it from her mother. The treat was always reserved for a bitterly cold night, and the good things in it of which one had a taste—molasses, white sugar, lemon-peel, butter, peppermint, boiled raisins, and mysterious unknowns—were compounded with hot water into a palate-tickling beverage.
When Mrs. Blossom reappeared, with a kettle sending forth a small cloud of fragrant steam in one hand and a tray filled with tin cups in the other, the delighted "Ohs" and "Ahs" repaid her for all her extra work at the close of a busy, weary day.
Budd rolled over on the rug in his ecstasy, and Cherry was about to roll on top of him, when March interfered, and order was restored.
As they sat there on the big, braided square of woollen
