Mike waved his Christmas boughs aloft in great glee.
An old gentleman with gold-headed cane and spectacles was going up the steps of the market, followed by a beautiful black-and-white setter. The playful dog sprang at the green branches. Mike held on to them stoutly. The dog suddenly let go of them, and bounded away, while Mike rolled over and over to the foot of the steps, clutching tightly the pine boughs.
"You'll ketch it," he muttered, setting his teeth hard together behind his white lips, and trying in vain to scramble up.
"Yer hurt, bub?" asked a wrinkled old apple woman, turning round on her three-legged stool, and thrusting her nose inquiringly out of the folds of the old brown shawl, which was wrapped around her head.
"You bet I be!" whimpered Mike, pointing forlornly with his one unoccupied finger to his bruised ankle.
"Been playin' pitch-pennies, yer mis'ble young 'un!" grinned a tall boy, strolling by with his hands in his pockets, and his ferret eyes on the sharp lookout for mischief.
In a twinkling he swooped up Mike's small coin, which had rattled to the pavement, and vanished with them in a struggling tangle of horse cars and omnibuses before Mike finished his desperate yell of, "Gim me 'um."
By this time a crowd had gathered about the prostrate Mike, who, faint with pain, was at last lifted into the chaise of a kind-hearted doctor, who was passing, and carried to his house in Bone Court.
There we will leave Mike for a while, and look after the little pine tree on its way to Meadow Home.
Such a group of round, rosy faces as were on the watch for it in the great bay window of Meadow Home, peering out in the red sunset, straining their eyes in the dim twilight, and peering still more persistently as the stars came out through the gathering darkness!
The fire danced in the grate, and the shadows danced on the wall, and the four little heads danced more and more impatiently in the window pane, as the cold winter night settled down on the world outside of Meadow Home.
"They're run away with and threw out. What will you bet, Mab?" shouted Will, turning away from the window in disgust, and indulging in a double somerset.
"_Thrown_, Will," corrected Mabel, just now more indignant with his grammar than his slang.