A scarlet-beaded holly, fresh from the forests of the North Carolina mountains, is a Christmas Tree the wealthiest church in Christendom might covet. Such a one our heroes fixed upright and firm in the shackly old farm wagon. It seemed to grow from a soil deeply top dressed with corn fodder.
The resources of the one little store at the village were meagre but the genius of the decorators was not versatile. Gran’daddy chivalrously intended for the old women to have the best and in his eyes a new frock was a princely gift. As for the old men, what so appropriate and acceptable as a paper of plug tobacco. At this stage his ingenuity was exhausted and his grandson did the rest.
If there was anything that Grover Cleveland liked better than candy, it was more candy, and though he was unlearned in the letter of the Golden Rule its spirit was inherent in his nature. So, although the storekeeper had laid in an extra supply for the holiday trade (it was all in sticks, the kind in vogue when grandmas were little girls), when our small Santa Claus had made his purchases there was none left in stock and by the time material for seventeen calico gowns had been measured off, the storekeeper, among whose mental endowments the commercial instinct was not prominent, had persuaded himself that it was a crying injustice that the well-filled shelves of which he had been so proud should have been depleted at one purchase.
As much chagrined as pitiful, he watched his opportunity, and when Grover Cleveland, who was “toting” his packages from the store to the wagon where his grandfather sat, was gathering up his last armful he called him to a rear window.
“Do you see that ar woman toilin’ up the mountain with a poke on her back?”
“Ye-e-s!” cried the child, “and she’s got a little boy with her a heap littler than me!”
“That woman’s yer Aunt Calliny; and that ar little boy’s your own cousin. Don’t you think one of them caliker frocks ought to go to her and some of that candy to little Jakey? Why, he’s named for your gran’daddy.”
The loyal little grandson turned away dispiritedly saying only:
“She done gran’daddy mean.”
“And that ar little feller’s shoes is the raggedest you ever see,” this last remark was flung after the boy who was making a rapid exit.