If you think that the three little Jutts found nothing but bottles of medicine in their stockings, when they got down-stairs on Christmas morning, you are very much mistaken. Indeed, there was much more than that—a great deal more than that. I will not tell you what it was; for you might sniff, and say, “Huh! That’s little enough!” But there was more than medicine. No man—rich man, poor man, beggarman nor thief, doctor, lawyer nor merchant chief—ever yet left a Hudson’s Bay Company’s post, stared in the face by the chance of having to seek hospitality of a Christmas Eve—no right-feeling man, I say, ever yet left a Hudson’s Bay Company’s post, under such circumstances, without putting something more than medicine in his pack. I chance to know, at any rate, that upon this occasion Doctor Luke did not. And I know, too—you may be interested to learn it—that as we floundered through the deep snow, homeward bound, soon after dawn, the next day, he was glad enough that he hadn’t. No merry shouts came over the white miles from the cottage of Jonas Jutt, though I am sure that they rang there most heartily; but the doctor did not care: he shouted merrily enough for himself, for he was very happy. And that’s the way you’d feel, too, if you spent your days hunting good deeds to do.
XXI
DOWN NORTH
When, in my father’s house, that night, the Christmas revel was over—when, last of all, in noisy glee, we had cleared the broad kitchen floor for Sir Roger De Coverly, which we danced with the help of the maids’ two swains and Skipper Tommy Lovejoy and Jacky, who had come out from the Lodge for the occasion (all being done to the tune of “Money Musk,” mercilessly wrung from an ancient accordion by Timmie Lovejoy)—when, after that, we had all gathered before the great blaze in the best room, we told no tales, such as we had planned to tell, but soon fell to staring at the fire, each dreaming his own dreams.
It may be that my thoughts changed with the dying blaze—passing from merry fancies to gray visions, trooping out of the recent weeks, of cold and hunger and squalid death in the places from which we had returned.
“Davy!” said my sister.