“We’ve brought our excuse with us,” and Archie set down before Mrs. Osgood a bulky newspaper parcel. Bess, smiling mysteriously, refused to answer inquiries, and when the greetings were over Archie produced a knife and started to cut the string.
“Tell them the story first, Archie,” suggested Bess.
“You think it would be more dramatic? Well, 92 maybe so, maybe so. Ladies and Gentlemen: I have here a gift for the Winsted Public Library. It comes most appropriately on this evening, when the original supporters of that institution are celebrating their release from its responsibility! Miss Symonds,” indicating Bess with a graceful curve of his thumb, “and myself were proceeding hither to join you. Our way led us past the spacious edifice dedicated now to the Cause of Learning and Recreation, having once been given over to hats, and later still, as many now present remember, to rats! The library is, as some of you are aware, not open on Wednesday evenings. Therefore we were surprised to see standing before the door in an attitude of patient expectancy, a rustic gentleman, bearing in his arm this identical parcel. We hesitated and then remarked courteously to the gentleman that there was small hope of his obtaining satisfaction at that particular portal before to-morrow afternoon. His face fell. Seeing which phenomenon, Miss Symonds,” again the thumb curve, “being of a kindly nature, offered sympathy to the disappointed reader. He opened his heart to us–and also his bundle. It seems he was not there to borrow books, but to bestow blessings. The article herein contained was destined by his wife, its maker, to adorn the library’s walls.”
“He said,” interrupted Bess, “that he was sure we didn’t have anything like it, because his wife 93 invented it, and he didn’t know as there was another in the world, even. He seemed to think the library was a kind of museum and every one was sending things, and he and ‘wife’ wanted to, too. He was a dear old man. So clean, and he wore a red shawl around his neck this hot night–” Bess tossed her own bare head at the thought, and fanned her pretty white shoulders. “Do show it to them, Archie, and don’t make fun. He really thought we would think it was lovely, and it certainly is unusual.”
“Open it, open it!”
Archie dropped to one knee, cut the string, and, removing one paper after another, lifted slowly a hoop bound in red wool, from which depended twenty fat little birds made of scraps of velvet.
Silence and bewilderment. Then, “What’s it for?” faltered some one.
“We must explain it,” said Bess laughing. “They don’t understand. Neither did we, at first. It’s not for anything. It’s just an ornament, a beautiful parlor ornament. And you hang it from the chandelier and set it swinging. So!” She illustrated and the gay little birds bobbed merrily up and down.
“They are hung on spiral wires of different lengths, you see, to make them more lifelike and natural.”
Every one was full of delight and amusement now, and one hand after another poked the poor 94 little birds till they bobbed to a degree dangerous to their shoe-button eyes.