By this time they had reached home, and Sam hurried up the steps, he was so eager to tell Grandmamma about Billy. Sam’s papa and mamma were travelling in Europe, with his little sister Anne, and he was staying with his grandparents. He was so fond of them that he was not at all lonely.
“I miss Anne very much, and I should like to see Papa and Mamma,” he had remarked to his nurse Mary one day; “but grandpapas and grandmammas let you do a great many more things than papas and mammas do.”
“Oh, you mustn’t say that,” Mary had replied.
“Mary,” Sam had said very earnestly, “how would you like to be spanked with a hair-brush?”
Mary had made no reply to this argument; and Sam, in response to her silence, had said with the positive air of one who has had experience,—
“Well, then!”
On this day Sam found his grandmamma seated in her sunny sewing-room, and he was in such a hurry to tell her all about Billy that he gave her a very confused idea of the matter. The fire and Jack and the little blind boy became so mixed up in his story that it was some time before she understood the case.
Now Sam’s grandmamma was just exactly as nice for a grandmamma as his grandpapa was for a grandpapa, and Sam loved one just as well as the other. “The only difference is that Grandmamma was never a little boy like me, same as Grandpapa was,” Sam used to say.
“We must see what can be done for the poor child,” said Grandmamma when Sam had finished his story.
Then Sam told his plan about asking God to make Billy see, and Grandmamma thought it an excellent plan, only that perhaps it couldn’t be brought about by Christmas, because the time was very near.