“You haven’t been eating chestnuts, have you, Tot? It seems as though I smelled them.”
“No, marm,” replied naughty, trembling Tot.
“That’s right, for you’d be sure to have dreadful nightmares,” said Mrs. Sheldon, as she bade her child good-night, and closed the door, distrusting the evidence of her own keen sense of smell.
“Well, anyway,” said Tot to herself, as her mother’s footsteps died away, “I hadn’t eaten any, so I didn’t tell a lie.”
She thought the matter over a moment, thinking of the nightmares of which she had been so often told, and half resolving to be so good a girl as not to eat any of the nuts; but in the midst of her resolution her hand strayed beneath her pillow, and into a paper-bag, and came out with a splendid great chestnut, which she had no sooner tasted than she sat up in bed, and with the bag in her lap began a feast.
The room was not very dark, for the light from the hall burner streamed through the transom over her door; and, if it had been pitch dark, Tot had no fear of it, for she had never been frightened with any of the silly, wicked stories often told to children.
So she crunched away on the delicious nuts until they were about half gone, and then stopped suddenly with a sense of fear lest she had eaten too many, rolled the bag carefully about the rest, put them under her pillow, and soon dozed off to sleep.
But she didn’t sleep as soundly as usual, and woke up sometime in the night, when the hall-light had been put out, and it was perfectly dark. Her hand was tightly grasping the bag of nuts, and as she didn’t go at once to sleep, she thought she would try just one more,—which resulted in her again sitting up in bed, and finishing the pint of roasted chestnuts in the dark.
“She sat up in bed, and began a feast.”