"Wait! Wait!" gasped the old woman. "Tell me mo' about that boy who showed you. You ain't got it right. But dat's the way my Sneezer done it. Only he knows just how."
"Why, Mammy June!" cried Rose, "you don't suppose that Sam can dance just like your Sneezer?"
The old nurse was wiping the tears from her cheeks. Her voice was much choked with emotion as well. Mrs. Bunker came over to see what the matter was.
"Yo' please tell me, Ma'am, all about dat boy dese children say was in Boston? Please, Ma'am! Ain't nobody know how to dance dat way but Sneezer. And he didn't like his name, Ebenezer Caliper Spotiswood Meiggs. No'm, he didn't like it at all, 'cause we-all shortened it to Sneezer.
"He had an Uncle Sam, too. My brudder. Lives in Birmingham. Sneezer always said he wisht he'd been born wid a name like Uncle Sam."
"Perhaps it is the same boy," Mother Bunker said kindly. "Tell me just how Ebenezer looks, Mammy June. Then I can be sure."
From the way Mammy described her youngest son, even the children recognized him as Sam the chore boy at Aunt Jo's in Boston. Mun Bun and Margy, when the matter was quite settled that Sam was Sneezer, began to take great pride in the fact that it was their bright eyes that had first spied the colored boy walking in the snow and had been the first to invite him into Aunt Jo's house.
"He will be there when we go to Boston again, Mammy June," Rose said, warmly. "And Daddy and Mother will send him home to you. I guess he'll be glad to come. Only, maybe you'd better stop calling him Sneezer. He likes Sam best."
"Sure enough, honey," cried Mammy June, "I'll call him anything he likes 'long as he comes home and stays home with me. Yes, indeedy! I'd call him Julius Cæsar Mark Antony Meiggs, if he wants I should."
"But maybe," said Russ thoughtfully, "he wouldn't like that name any better than the other. I know I shouldn't."