"They want worsted dolls," he explained at last, "two dozen worsted dolls to be sent across the water in time for Christmas."
Jacob raised his hands with a gesture of despair, for at his shop they did not make worsted dolls, and he could not understand why any one should want them.
"There is plenty of time to make them," Mother Munster said. "The girls and I can knit them, and we will make half of them girls and half of them boy dolls." And so the knitted dolls were begun by good Mother Munster and her daughters.
One day when Mother Munster was knitting on the last doll, which was a boy, she began to think how much she would miss them when they were finished and sent across the sea.
"I will make you extra large," she said as she added a few stitches to the length and breadth of the doll, "and if I could I would knit you a tongue so you could talk and legs that you could run on, and have you like a live boy."
Mother Munster knitted as she thought, and though she did not know it, she knitted all her wishes into the boy doll's body, so that when he was finished he could do all the things she had wished.
But he was a wise little fellow, and did not betray himself for fear he would not be shipped across the water with the other dolls, and he wanted to see the world.
It was a long journey to the other side of the ocean, and the boy doll thought it never would end. But by and by he was taken from the big packing-case and with other dolls placed in a window of a big shop.
"I wish some one would speak to me," thought the boy doll, but not a word did the other dolls utter, and as he did not wish to appear forward he kept silent also.
One day a lady came into the store and carried Boy Doll away with her, and then one night he was put on a tree trimmed with glittering ropes of tinsel.