“Poor Mary!” said Heinz.
The procession abruptly halted.
The children’s tongues had been running so fast about the nearness of Christmas, and what gifts the Christ-child might be expected to deposit in their shoes, that no one heard a sound from the kitchen until they had almost reached the lowest step.
“Tina, but why do you stop there?” cried the pastor, who at the turn, with the baby in his arms, could see nothing of what was happening below. “Go ahead!” he added in English, being very anxious that his children should acquire the language of their adopted country.
They were good children, and did their best to obey. Heinz made a flying leap down two steps, and, being withheld by Tina’s grasp upon his petticoats from landing on his head, brought some other portion of his anatomy, less toughened by hard knocks, in contact with the steps, whereupon he howled like the last of the Wampanoags. Tina, from the violence of the exertion, fell back upon Bruno and Gretchen, and Franz made two long steps over everybody’s head, and landed first of all in the kitchen.
“Donnerwetter!” said the pastor under his breath, but from the bottom of his heart.
There sat Mary on the floor, her apron over her head, howling like a legion of wolves; Heinz was singing the tenor of the same song, the baby added a soprano, Tina rubbed her back, and Bruno, with doubled fists, attacked Franz, who, he averred, had kicked him on the head in passing. Gretchen alone retained sufficient equanimity to realize the full situation.
“Oh, Tina!” she cried, “the coffee is all boiled over, and the sausages burnt to nothing at all.”
“When your mother died,” said the pastor solemnly, after they had eaten such breakfast as was possible under the circumstances, “when your dear mother died, children, I had no time to sit and weep. And I was able to do all that I had to do; but Mary, it seems, was not able even to move back the sausages. Come, let us wash the dishes.”
Matters did not improve as the day went on. There never were better children than Heinz and Bruno; but when one had upset the dishwater, and the other fallen against the stove, in their eagerness to be of use, and they had consequently been turned adrift on the wide world, pray, could they be expected to be as quiet as mice? It was quite natural they should find their way to the pastor’s study, where there was an excellent fire; natural, too, that the thought of tidying the room, as an atonement for their presence there and previous misadventures, should occur to them; and most natural of all that they should upset the lamp over a valuable book, which had been a college prize of their father’s.