"And the bowl broke," said the lunch-counter young man.
"I'll pay for it, Tom," said Grandpa Ford, who seemed to know the young man. "That'll be all right. I'll pay for the bowl and the cakes, too. Some of them are all right. They fell on this newspaper."
And this was true. Mun Bun had reached up, standing on his tip-toes, to get a cake out of the bowl. As he said, he was hungry, and while Daddy Bunker and Grandpa Ford were talking about getting the children something to eat, Mun Bun had wandered off by himself, found the lunch counter, and started to help himself. But he was not quite tall enough, and the glass bowl had fallen with a crash.
The cakes had scattered out, but, as Grandpa Ford had said, some of them had fallen on a clean newspaper which some one had dropped on the depot floor just before the accident.
Grandpa Ford, Daddy Bunker and Tom, the lunchman, picked up the clean cakes and put them in another bowl. The broken pieces of the smashed bowl and the cakes that had gone on the floor were also picked up.
"Well, now that we're all here, we might as well get the children something to eat," said Grandpa Ford. "Tom can give them hot milk and cakes, and we grown-folks can have some hot coffee to get us ready for the ride out to Great Hedge. Tom, can you take care of this big family?"
"Oh, I guess so," was the answer, and the lunchman was not angry now, for he saw he would lose nothing by what Mun Bun had done.
The six little Bunkers ate well, for the other five, as well as Mun Bun, were hungry. Then, when the grown-ups had been fed, and the broken bowl paid for, Grandpa Ford went out into the storm to tell his man, who was in charge of the horses and sled, that the party was ready to start. The horses had been kept waiting under a shed so they would be out of the storm.
"Oh, that sounds just like Santa Claus!" cried Margy, as the sound of jingling bells was heard outside the depot.
It seemed rather hard to leave the cosy, bright, warm station at that hour of the night and start out into the darkness and storm. But the children did not mind it. They were too eager to get to Great Hedge and see Grandma Ford. That is, most of them were. Perhaps Mun Bun and Margy were a bit too sleepy to care much what happened.