CHAPTER LI.
HEIRESS AND BEAUTY.
Meanwhile all Claudia Merlin's time was taken up with milliners, mantua makers, and jewelers. She was to make her first appearance in society at the President's first evening reception, which was to be held on Friday, the sixth of January. It was now very near the New Year, and all her intervening time was occupied in preparations for the festivities that were to attend it.
On the twenty-third of December, two days before Christmas, Mr. and Mrs. Middleton and all their family arrived. They came up by the "Columbia," and reached Judge Merlin's house early in the morning. Consequently they were not fatigued, and the day of their arrival was a day of unalloyed pleasure and of family jubilee.
Ishmael took sympathetic part in all the rejoicings, and was caressed by Mr. and Mrs. Middleton and all their younger children as a sort of supplementary son and brother.
On Christmas Eve, also, Reuben Gray, Hannah, and her children came to town in their wagon. Honest Reuben had brought a load of turkeys for the Christmas market, and had "put up" at a plain, respectable inn, much frequented by the farmers, near the market house; but in the course of the day he and his wife, leaving the children in the care of their faithful Sally, who had accompanied them in the character of nurse, called on Ishmael and brought him his trunk of wearing apparel.
The judge, in his hearty, old-fashioned, thoughtless hospitality, would have had Reuben and his family come and stop at his own house. But Reuben Gray, with all his simplicity, had the good sense firmly to decline this invitation and keep to his tavern.
"For you know, Hannah, my dear," he said to his wife, when they found themselves again, at the Plow, "we would bother the family more'n the judge reckoned on. What could they do with us? Where could they put us? As to axing of us in the drawing room or sitting of us down in the dining room, with all his fine, fashionable friends, that wasn't to be thought on! And as to you being put into the kitchen, along of the servants, that I wouldn't allow! Now the judge, he didn't think of all these things: but I did; and I was right to decline the invitation, don't you think so?"
"Of course you were, Reuben, and if you hadn't declined it, I would, and that I tell you," answered Mrs. Gray.
"And so, Hannah, my dear, we will just keep our Christmas where we are! We won't deprive Ishmael of his grand Christmas dinner with his grand friends; but we will ax him to come over and go to the playhouse with us and see the play, and then we'll all come back and have a nice supper all on us together. We'll have a roast turkey and mince pie and egg-nog and apple toddy, my dear, and make a night of it, once in a way! What do you think?"