She never thought of wanting all those treasures further than she already had them.

She gazed at the wonders in that department where the toy animals were kept, and which resembled a miniature menagerie, the silence broken by the mooing of cows, the braying of donkeys, the whistle of canaries, and the roars of mock-lions when their powers were invoked by the attendants, and her ears drank in that discordant bable of tiny mimicry like music.

There was no spirit of criticism in her.
She was utterly pleased with everything.
When her grandmother held up a toy-horse and said the fore-legs were too long, Ellen wondered what she meant.

To her mind it was more like a horse than any real one she had ever seen.
As she gazed at the decorations, the wreaths, the gauze, the tinsel, and paper angels, suspended by invisible wires over the counters, and all glittering and shining and twinkling with light, a strong whiff of evergreen fragrance came to her, and the aroma of fir-balsam, and it was to her the very breath of all the mysterious joy and hitherto untasted festivity of this earth into which she had come.

She felt deep in her childish soul the sense of a promise of happiness in the future, of which this was a foretaste.