“Yes, he is in my class, and I am his Aunt Nellie; but he will be very kind to you. He is not a bad boy. Come, and perhaps you may get something at Christmas. Do you know what that is?”
“Yes, it’s when the old chap fetches things down the chimbly; but he never brung me none. We’re poor, and Hetty keeps house and runs the streets all the time, and Mag and I is alone. I’ll tell Maggie, and mayby she’ll come. She’s got a new gown Miss Katy give her. I must go now, we are goin’ to have hasty puddin’ for dinner.”
He took his heavy basket and almost staggering under the load walked slowly away. As usual at that time of day Hetty was out, but Maggie, a dark faced girl of twelve, was waiting for him, and with her help a fire was soon kindled in the old broken stove, and the hasty pudding, of which Bennie had spoken, was boiling and bubbling in the one kettle the miserable house afforded.
“I wish we had some ’lasses, don’t you?” Bennie said, as Maggie poured into his dish more than half of the blue milk she had begged of a neighbor.
But molasses was a luxury quite beyond the means of the Hewitts, and so Bennie ate his pudding and skimmed milk, and told Maggie of Wallie Morgan who had called him tow-heard and of the beautiful lady who had invited him to Sunday school.
“Yes that’s Nellie Morgan, his aunt; his mother’s dead, and she keeps house and has a class, a big one, in Sunday school, and give Jane Shaw a doll and a dress and lots of candy and pop-corn last Christmas, and her brother Tim got a top and a whip.”
“My, that’s jolly; less go to her class next Sunday,” Bennie said, his fancy caught with the top and the whip, and the shoes which would keep his little red toes from the cold.
But Bennie was a delicate child and when Sunday came he was sick and lay on an old rug in a little room off from the kitchen where he was safe from his drunken father, while Maggie went to church and into Miss Morgan’s class.
That day was a new era in Maggie’s life, and unmindful of the bitter cold which struck through her thin garments and made her shiver involuntarily, she hurried home to Bennie with the picture card she had received and the wonderful story she had heard of Jesus’ birthday and the baby born among the cows and oxen in that far off manger in Bethlehem. Wonderingly Bennie listened, asking innumerable questions about the child; was he ever cold, or hungry, and was he afraid of the cattle, and did his father get drunk and thrash him? To all these inquiries Maggie answered no decidedly, but when Bennie asked if he really could hear what every body said and would give them what they wanted, Maggie was doubtful. She thought, however, they better try it, and so the two forlorn little ones knelt down as Maggie said they did in church and tried to pray. But neither knew what to say and when Bennie suggested that his sister ought to know “’cause she’d been to meetin’,” she answered, “I know they said Our Father, I am sure of that.”
But Bennie scoffed at this idea, “That baby in the hay our father! Why, pa is drunk down to the grocery!”