Now, an important item in the schedule is my friend and confidant, Lizzie McCormick. She was one of the most remarkable things that ever was, being much and yet nothing. She was a myth—a creation of my fancy—but almost as real as any of you sitting here. There was a drunken old bachelor of the name of McCormick who lived not far away, and Lizzie claimed that she was his girl. I made her acquaintance one day when I had been very bad and was shut in my room alone. She sprang out of the air suddenly, and sat down beside me on the rag carpet, and made a gulping sound—like that of “a hen with the pip,” as our washerwoman said when I tried to make the sound for her. Lizzie was a freckled girl with red hair and a very long neck, and gold teeth and a wooden leg, because she had been shot in the war.
We played marbles together, and talked freely in a tongue so “foreign” that no human being could understand it, as my mother informed me later. She showed me her trinkets, and among them was a thing she called “a silver horruck,” which Santa Claus had brought to her—a shiny thing that looked like a goose's leg. She was with me a good deal after that, and always slept with me in my trundle-bed. In due time she began to do and say things for which I was held responsible, and eventually became a ghost, when I would have no more to do with her.
You will remember I spoke of the little green book. It was kept in a high drawer. Often I begged for a look at it, and when my mother opened the drawer I was on my tiptoes and reaching for the sacred thing. When I had looked at the pictures she put it away again very tenderly.
Well, that is about as things stood with me in my childhood. I have given you a core out of the bed-rock, and let it go at that—saving one circumstance. It will all help you to understand me.
I come now to the true tales, which are better for the fireside, on a white Christmas, than all that kind of thing. First, I shall tell you the very brief adventure of
CRICKET AND THE CHILD GHOST
Go back with me to the winter of 1850, when hard times travelled over the land like a pestilence, and even entered the houses of the great. I was in my seventh year, and my assets had been largely increased by the steady friendship of Santa Claus. But he was going to pass me that year, the times being harder for him than for other people. I felt sorry for him, and sorry for my sister and mother, and sorry, too, for myself.
Well, it was the day before Christmas, and I had been to school and was on my way home alone, my sister being ill, and night was near. Suddenly I became aware that Lizzie McCormick was limping along beside me.
“It don't pay to be good,” said she, impatiently.
“I've been very good for a long, long time,” I answered. “I've filled the wood-box every night an' morning, an' I gave half my candy to Sarah. I guess God was surprised.”