Jane’s brown eyes had been fixed wistfully on his face while he read and she wriggled painfully when he smiled once or twice during the perusal.
“I’m ’fraid it’s pretty crooked—p’raps I could change the spelling if you’d tell me. I didn’t like to ask anybody ’cause they’d want to know what for.”
“We won’t change a single thing, Chicken Little. See, we are going to seal it right up—and pop—here goes the stamp. This letter shall be on board that seven-thirty train for Cincinnati or my name isn’t Dick Harding. And if it doesn’t make Mr. Joseph Fletcher do some thinking, why he is a little meaner than most men—that’s all.”
Affairs in the Morton family went on uneventfully for the next ten days. Chicken Little was busy in school and Mrs. Morton much occupied with preparations for Christmas.
Ernest was full of certain Christmas schemes of his own to the decided detriment of his lessons. He had purchased a scroll saw and patterns, and was firmly resolved to present each individual member of the family with his handiwork. Some of the designs he had selected were exceedingly intricate and hard on the eyes, but he was not to be dissuaded from using them and he toiled away all his spare moments at the fancy brackets and towel rack. He had great difficulty in concealing the various pieces from the persons for whom they were intended. He got so cross about it that it soon became a family habit to cough loudly, before approaching his room on any errand whatsoever.
The little girls soon caught the Christmas fever also. Alice helped Jane with her mother’s present, a book-mark on perforated cardboard done in shades of green silk, which Chicken Little regarded as a great work of art. She fussed away happily over it, tormenting Alice all the while with guesses as to what her mother was to give her. She had exploded the Santa Claus fiction two years before.
“Alice, do you s’pose she will get me that wax doll? There’s a perfect dear down at Wolf’s. It has blue eyes that shut—and real hair—oh, it’s just as yellow. I never saw such yellow hair, but Mr. Wolf said it was really hair. Oh, do you think she’ll get that for me? Alice, I wish you’d just tell her that’s what I want.”
A few days later she rushed in pink with excitement.
“Alice, it’s gone! Do you s’pose Mother got it? Katy says she thinks Grace Dart’s mother bought it for her. I’m going to ask Sherm. Maybe he’d know. Oh, I do hope Mother got it!”
Another source of excitement was the Sunday School cantata to be given Christmas eve, in which Jane and Gertie were both to have the parts of fairies and Sherm a small role. The little girls trotted obediently back and forth to rehearsals, proud to be in it, but Sherm was in open rebellion, the said rehearsals taking away most of his time with the boys. Katy scoffed openly at the fairies, not having been asked to be one herself.