"Christmas," said Mrs. Muffet
in her most economical tone,
"comes but once a year, so we
must make it go as far as possible.
The best way for a child
to do that is to sit and meditate.
You've no idea how long a holiday
seems till you sit still and
think about it. Count sixty, that
will be just one
minute, and another,
and another,
and then
another—sixty
times one, and
then sixty times
that, and then twenty-four times that makes—well—it
makes—the exact number doesn't matter
much," said Mrs. Muffet, who wasn't quick
at mental arithmetic, "but you'll see that there
are quite a considerable number of seconds in
Christmas Day—quite
enough for any growing
child." So at Christmas
time Mrs. Muffet would go
out to visit the neighbors,
leaving the little girl seated
on a very uncomfortable
tuffet, to meditate on the
passage of time.
Perhaps some of you
would like to know what a
tuffet is. I have thought
of that myself, and have
taken the trouble to ask several
learned persons. They
assure me that the most complete and satisfactory
definition is,—a tuffet is the kind of thing that
Miss Muffet sat on. With this explanation I shall
go on with my story. As she sat on her tuffet
counting up the seconds of Christmas Eve, and had
already reached the sum of two thousand one hundred
and seven, a strange thing happened. A visitor
came and sat down beside her. You guess
who he was? Yes—an elderly, benevolent spider.
He was short-sighted and wore green spectacles,
and had evidently a little rheumatism in his
legs, but as he had eight of them, he managed to
get along very well.
The kind of thing that Miss Muffet sat on
Now the way you may have heard the story is that when the kind old spider sat down beside her, it frightened Miss Muffet away. That story must be true because I myself have seen it in print, but it happened at another time, when Miss Muffet was very little indeed.
On the Christmas Eve I am telling about, she had become a very sensible little girl, and knew all about spiders, so instead of running away, she made room for him on the tuffet and said, "I am very glad to see you, Mr. Spider." Mr. Spider bowed and looked at her in a kindly way through his spectacles, but said nothing.
"I hope your family are all well; I mean the family Arachnida, sub-order, I forget the name. We've enjoyed dissecting those we could get; and you deserve a great deal of credit for the curious way in which you are put together, with your funny thorax and everything."
"Let's change the subject, Miss," said the spider, moving toward the further side of the tuffet. "This is Christmas Eve."
Fairly jumped off her tuffet
"Yes," answered Miss Muffet wearily. "Sixty seconds make a minute; sixty minutes make an hour. Even Christmas Eve will come to an end some time; but what's the good? For then Christmas will come, and that will never get through."
