XXVI.
CONCLUSION.
Here Uncle Juvinell paused, and, with a countenance of undisturbed sobriety, emptied his ninth mug. In justice, however, to the good man, this pattern of old-fashioned gentility, it must be borne in mind, that the mug was a Dutch mug, and consequently a small one (as indeed are all things Dutch, from clocks to cheeses); and also that, small as it was, he never more than half filled it, except once or twice in the course of an evening, when he would gird up his loins, as it were, with a brimmer to help him over some passage in his story of unusual knottiness and difficulty.
Willie (whose surname should have been fox or weasel or lynx), having heretofore divided his attention between what his uncle imparted and what he imbibed, had, by careful counting, discovered that the ninth mug invariably closed their evening lessons: so, without waiting for any further signal that such was now the case, he alertly bounced from his chair, and, snatching up a basket of big red apples that black daddy had just brought in and set on the hearth, began handing them round to the rest of the company with a great show of playing the polite and obliging, but taking care, when unobserved, to pick out the largest and mellowest one of them all for himself, and smuggle it under his coat-tail. When all were helped, he reset the basket on the hearth, and with a grand flourish, unmasking his royal red, opened wide his mouth, as if he would have bolted it whole: but, seeming to think better of it, he carefully laid it in Uncle Juvinell's mug, which it exactly filled, saying as he did so, "It goes to my heart to part with you; but only the king of historians is worthy to enjoy the queen of apples." Then, plunging his hand into the basket, he snatched up another, hap-hazard, and began eating it with savage voracity, as if made reckless by this act of self-denial. Re-seating himself as he had chosen his apple, hap-hazard, he missed his chair, and keeled over, bringing his heels in the air where his head should have been, and his head on the rug where the dog and cat were, and the half-munched plug in his mouth, plump into his windpipe, so as to almost strangle him out of his breeches, and cause his buttons to fly like grains from a corn-cob when thrown into a corn-sheller. Of course, all the little folks fairly screamed with laughter, in which even Uncle Juvinell could not help joining right heartily: nor would he venture upon the broad wedge which he had cut out of his apple, till his chuckle was well ended; when he remarked, that "Willie was one of the boys we read about." To which Willie, picking himself up again, replied, that "he rather thought he was not, just then, but perhaps would be as soon as he could get back some of the breath he had lost, and gather up the buttons he had shed." Then, drawing down his waistcoat from under his arm-pits to hide a breadth of white muslin not usually intended for the eyes of a mixed company, he reseated himself with such care and circumspection, that the middle seam of his breeches tallied exactly with the middle round of the chair-back, and began mincing and nibbling his apple delicately like a sheep, as if to show that he meant to profit by the lesson his fit of strangling had taught him.
After a little while, when he saw that the children had had their fill of laughter and red apples, Uncle Juvinell wiped the blade of his knife with his bandanna, and said, "And now, my darlings, don't you think we are getting along swimmingly?"
"Swimmingly!" they all chimed in with one voice.
"Gloriously?" again inquired Uncle Juvinell.
"Gloriously!" cried all the children at once, as pat to their uncle's words as an echo to the sound. Whereupon the old gentleman's spectacles shone with a lustre that was charming to see. In a moment after, however, Bryce, the pugnacious urchin of ten, expressed himself a little disappointed that they had had so much building of forts, and digging and cutting of roads, and so much scouting and marching, and so much getting ready to fight, and yet withal so little downright fighting.
"You quite forget, Bryce, that affair of Grant's defeat there at Fort Duquesne," said Willie. "In my opinion, that was a very decent, respectable piece of bloodshed; and quite as good as Braddock's disaster, as far as it goes."