THE MIGHTY DREAD. 
|? promised to be a sickening Christmas. 
The tenants had moved out of the 
house two days ago, leaving it as empty, 
dark, and hollowly echoing as a cave, and as 
cold as the snow, that covered the world 
without, could make it. There is no place 
so unspeakably desolate as the deserted 
habitation of man. 
There was one tenant, however, who had 
not left, and he was utterly miserable. As 
dusk drew a curtain of blue haze across the 
spotless white garden, and the last cold robin 
sang his last bar of music outside the window 
for the crumbs that would never come, he, 
that tenant, awoke—singing. It was a funny, 
little, high-pitched, crooning sort of song, 
bound within one octave only, and ending on 
an ascending scale with a distinct effort at a 
trill. 
The last thin rays of light from a bitter, 
pale-green sky proved that he was just an 
ordinary little house mouse; but nothing 
could show how hungry he was. He was 
hungry in two ways, for the yearning had 
arisen within him to add to his already 
heaped-up troubles by taking a wife, and that 
