Master John Hunter lay on the bed, very wide awake, making sputtering efforts to devour his thumb, while he kicked his little feet as vigorously as the confines of the pinning-blanket would allow.
Silas chuckled. Hearing a noise at the door, the heir of the house rolled his head on his pillow till his mother’s face came within the range of his vision. Her absence that day had made the child more than usually eager for her presence. The little feet kicked more wildly than ever, and forgetting the generous slice of thumb still to be devoured, he grinned such a vast and expansive grin that the hand to which the thumb was attached, being free, joined the other in waving salutations of such joyful pantomime that the object of his industrious beckonings, completely carried into the current, rushed at him and, sweeping him up in her arms, tossed him on high as gleefully as if she had not been weighed down by care but a moment before the old man’s advent into the room.
“There, Mr. Chamberlain, was there ever another like him?” she cried.
Baby, who had come down from a point as high as his mother’s arms could reach, doubled his fat little body together with a smothered, squeezed off little gurgle of delight. Silas was aquiver with sympathetic glee. Those were not the days when babies were raised by scientific rules, and Silas caught the child from its mother’s arms and repeated the tossing process, while the baby shouted and struggled. At last the three, followed by the family, retired to convenient chairs about the sitting-room fire.
“Now, Jack Horner, you can pare that thumb down a leetle more if you want t’. You’ve swallowed enough wind to give you the colic for a day or two,” Silas said when the child began to hiccough.
Elizabeth clapped her hands delightedly.
“You have named the baby!” she exclaimed.
“How’s that?” Silas asked.
“Oh, John can’t bear to have him called Johnnie, and John is too awfully old for him now. Little Jack Horner—no, Little Jack Hunter. I’m so glad! I just do love it; and we had called him Baby till I was afraid we’d never quit it,” Elizabeth said.
They kept the old man as long as they could induce him to stay, and when he did go home it was with the settled conviction that he had been wanted. He described the visit enthusiastically to Liza Ann and tried to induce her to go over to see Elizabeth the next Sunday. Silas craved the privilege of that baby’s presence.