How To Tell Children Stories, page 88 by Sara Cone Bryant
<< Return to Title Details & Download89
ng they could see from the floor, they started up the tree to see more. All over the tree they ran, creepy, crawly, looking at every single thing. Up and down, in and out, over every branch and twig, the little spiders ran, and saw every one of the pretty things right up close.
They stayed till they had seen all there was to see, you may be sure, and then they went away at last, QUITE happy.
Then, in the still, dark night before Christmas Day, the dear Christ-child came, to bless the tree for the children. But when he looked at it--WHAT do you suppose?--it was covered with cobwebs! Everywhere the little spiders had been they had left a spider-web; and you know they had been everywhere. So the tree was covered from its trunk to its tip with spider- webs, all hanging from the branches and looped round the twigs; it was a strange sight.
What could the Christ-child do? He knew that house-mothers do not like cobwebs; it would never, never do to have a Christmas Tree covered with those. No, indeed.
So the dear Christ-child touched the spider's webs, and turned them all to gold! Wasn't that a lovely trimming? They shone and shone, all over the beautiful tree. And that is the way the Christmas Tree came to have golden cob- webs on it.
WHY THE MORNING-GLORY CLIMBS[1]
[1] This story was given me by Miss Elisabeth McCracken, who wrote it some years ago in a larger form, and who told it to me in the way she had told it to many children of her acquaintance.
Once the Morning-Glory was flat on the ground. She grew that way, and she had never climbed at all. Up in the top of a tree near her lived Mrs Jennie Wren and her little baby Wren. The little Wren was lame; he had a broken wing and couldn't fly. He stayed in the nest all day. But the mother Wren told him all about what she saw in the world, when she came flying home at night. She used to tell him about the beautiful Morning-Glory she saw on the ground. She told him about the Morning-Glory every day, until the little Wren was