Jim had a thousand things to tell me. He has been studying terribly hard, and he has made some good friends, and is full of noble, loving ideas. He wants me to be a missionary to foreign lands, and I’m afraid I hurt Mother McBirney’s feelings a little when I laughed at him.
“Do I look like a missionary, Jim?” I asked him. But he insisted on being serious.
“If you have the heart of a missionary,” he said, “that will be all that is necessary. Your looks don’t matter a particle, Zalie.”
The way he said it, you would have thought I was something frightful to look at, but that it might be lived down.
“I want very much to help my neighbors along,” I said, “and to be helped by them, I hope, but to go to a foreign country and set up my ideas against theirs doesn’t appeal to me personally. You’ll have to excuse me, Jim.”
After a little while he got off his religious themes and was just good old jolly Jim, and then we had a fine time. For I confess that I felt a little strange with him when he talked religion. We made candy together—nut candy—and we popped corn, and got the supper, and played chess, and had prayers and went to bed. And the next two days were like unto this day.
Only, of course, we had our Christmas feast. They insisted on cooking the turkey and all the other good things while I was there, so that took a good deal of work, as you may imagine. But it was great fun, too. The little cottage reeked with delicious odors, and it was charming to see with its new curtains and the walls all trimmed with bittersweet and holly, and the pine knots burning in the fireplace.
Then, this morning, Semmy and I left.
“Don’t forget us, Zalie, don’t forget us,” dear Ma McBirney said when I kissed her good-bye.
“Never while life lasts, dear,” I told her. “Never while I have any brain to remember with.”