"Or, if you were from Michigan, they'd say you were a 'Michigander,'" chuckled Neale, who was with them. "In your case, Aggie, it would be 'Michigoose.'"
"Is that so?" demanded Agnes, to whom Neale had once confessed that he was born in the state of Maine. "Then I suppose we ought to call you a 'Maniac,' eh?"
"Hit! a palpable hit!" agreed Neale, good-naturedly. "Come on! let's have some of your bundles. For goodness' sake! why didn't you girls bring a bushel basket—or engage a pack-mule?"
"We seem to have secured a very good substitute for the latter," said Ruth, demurely.
All this shopping was done early in Christmas week, for the Corner House girls determined to allow nothing to break into their own home Christmas Eve celebration. The tree in Tess' room at school was going to be lighted up on Thursday afternoon; but Wednesday the Kenway girls were all excused from school early and Neale drove them over to Meadow Street in a hired sleigh.
They stopped before the doors of the respective shops of Mrs. Kranz and Joe Maroni. Joe's stand was strung with gay paper flowers and greens. He had a small forest of Christmas trees he was selling, just at the corner.
"Good-a day! good-a day, leetla padrona!" was his welcome for Ruth, and he bowed very low before the oldest Kenway girl, whom he insisted upon considering the real mistress of the house in which he and his family lived.
The little remembrances the girls had brought for Joe's family—down to a rattle for the baby—delighted the Italian. Tess had hung a special present for Maria on the school tree; but that was a secret as yet.
They carried all the presents into Mrs. Kranz's parlor and then Neale drove away, leaving the four Corner House girls to play their parts of Lady Bountiful without his aid.
They had just sallied forth for their first visit when, out of the Stower tenement in which the Goronofskys lived, boiled a crowd of shrieking, excited children. Sadie Goronofsky was at their head and a man in a blue suit and the lettered cap of a gas collector seemed the rallying point of the entire savage little gang.