“Snowed under!” cried Skeeter.
“But he got his wood cut and is now sitting by the fire quite happy, even grinning,” declared Lucy.
“Right again! Now comes a piece of holly and a pressed violet. That means that he finds a little belated violet in our flower beds in spite of the fact that the holly is king at this season. Sometimes he has so much to tell me that he must make many pictures. Here he found a sunset and it was so beautiful that he had to paint it with his colored crayons. This is where he fed the birds during the deep snow. He has a trough where he puts grain and seeds and crumbs for his winged friends. This is a picture of the trough and see the flocks of birds he has tried to draw to show how many are fed in his trough. This means a stranger has come in on him!” It was a picture of a hat and staff and down one side of the page were many drops of water, at least that was what the interested audience thought they were. At the top was an eye.
“Oh, I know!” exclaimed Lil. “If a hat and staff mean a stranger, those drops of water must mean rain.”
“The eye looks like a Mormon sign,” suggested Skeeter.
“I bet it means this,” said Lil, studying the page intently. “It means the stranger is old, or he would not have a staff, and it means he is unhappy. Those drops are tear drops. See how sad the eye looks!”
“‘Oh, a Daniel come to judgment!’ Young lady, you are right. That was a tired, sick traveler that our Tom Tit found and brought in and looked after for two weeks last winter. He was trying to cross the mountains and got lost and Tom Tit picked him up, almost starved and frozen. In this one, he shows the sick guest is still with him and in bed. He cannot draw faces well and hates to make anything too grotesque, so he usually has a sign or symbol for persons. The staff and hat in bed mean the guest is there. These little saddle-bags and hat mean he had to send for the doctor. Look at the medicine the poor staff and hat must take from the cruel saddle-bags! His own symbol is usually a jew’s-harp, although sometimes he makes himself a kind of butterfly——”
“Just like Whistler!” cried Lil.
“Yes, and in his way he is as great an artist as Whistler,” said the old man sadly. “If he had only had his chance! Well, well! Maybe he is happier as he is. I never saw a happier person, as a rule, than my poor boy. Tom Tit could never have written letters that would have been put in a book and called ‘The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,’ as that other great artist did. He makes friends with every living thing, and inanimate objects are friendly to him, too, I sometimes think. If his wits had been spared him, the world would have called him and the peace of the mountains would no longer have been his.”
The old man fingered the packet of letters tenderly while the young guests sat thoughtfully by. They could hear the cheerful Tom Tit in the kitchen washing dishes and whistling a strange crooning melody.