"So shall I to my grandchildren," said Dotty; "but not always. I shall have to look sober sometimes, and tell 'em how I had the sore throat, and couldn't swallow anything but boiled custards and cream toast. 'For,' says I, 'children, it was very different in those days.'"
"Ah, well, you little folks look forward, and we old folks look backward; but it all seems like a dream, either way, to me," said grandma Read, binding off the thumb of her little red mitten—"like a dream when it is told."
"Speaking of telling dreams, grandma, I had a funny one last night," said
Prudy, "about a queer old gentleman. Guess who it was."
"Thy grandfather, perhaps. Does thee remember, Alice, how thee used to sit on his knee and comb his hair with a toothpick?"
"I don't think 'twas me," said Dotty; "for I wasn't born then."
"It was I," replied Prudy. "I remember grandpa now, but I didn't use to.
It wasn't grandpa I dreamed about—it was Santa Claus."
Grandma smiled, and raised her spectacles to the top of her forehead.
"We never talked about fairies in my day," said she. "I never heard of a
Santa Claus when I was young."
"Well, grandma, he came down the chimney in a coach that looked like a Quaker bonnet on wheels—but he was all a-dazzle with gold buttons; and what do you think he said?"
"Something very foolish, I presume."