Aunt Martha waved a good-by from the doorstep.
“Seeing folks off seems to be a habit of ours this summer,” she said to Nellie and Dickie and Neil, who stood looking after the departing limousine, too dumbfounded at the disappearance of yet another playmate to utter a single word.
Just then, at the very moment when it should have happened, something nice did happen to Aunt Martha and her brood. Ralph in the Ford came clattering down the road, up which the limousine, with the happiest little girl in the world inside, was rolling so smoothly. He stopped the car at the doorstep, and tumbled out in great excitement and took from the tonneau a box. It was quite a big box, addressed to Aunt Martha, and sent by parcel post from a New York store.
You had better believe there was an instant chorus:
“Open it, Mother, please! Right off! Please do!”
Aunt Martha had Ralph carry the box into Grandma’s room, and the children all crowded round, from little Annie, on Grandma’s knee, to Ralph, who was as eager as the youngest. Aunt Martha untied the nice stout string very carefully and gave it to Grandma to roll up and save, and she removed the strong wrapping paper and folded it, to be put away in the drawer of the old dresser.
“Candy!” cried Neil, as the corrugated paste-board (Aunt Martha saved that, too!) was removed from a stack of dazzling white boxes. “I can just smell it.”
“Yumy-yumy!” sniffed Nellie in ecstasy.
It certainly was candy, and sent in the most thoughtful way, a box for each member of the family, marked with his or her name. There were chocolate-coated peppermints and gum-drops, her favorite sweets (as Somebody knew!) in Grandma’s box, and caramels of all kinds in Neil’s. There were bon-bons of every luscious color in Nellie’s box, and crystallized fruit in the one marked Ralph. There were chocolates for Dickie and Caroline (who wouldn’t need her box!) and there were fruit-drops and chocolate-coated molasses chips for Freddie, and dear little striped sticks of all colors and flavors for Annie to suck. For Aunt Martha there was the most beautiful two-pound box of chocolates and bon-bons, and on top, among the candied leaves of violets, was a card that read:
“I hope this will poison any kid who goes and eats it up on Aunt Martha.