It was afterwards that his grief and sorrow came. When his mother’s turn came, and she opened the parcels on her table, for in the Sheafe house each of them had a separate present-table, after she had passed the little children’s she came to Asaph’s present to her. It was in quite a large box done up in a German newspaper. She opened it carefully, and lifted out a Bohemian coffee-pot, which Asaph had bought at the German woman’s shop in Shawmut avenue. Mrs. Sheafe eagerly expressed her delight, and her wonder that Asaph knew she wanted it. But alas! all her love could not hide the fact that the nose of the coffee-pot was broken at the end, and what was left was all in splinters.
Poor Asaph saw it as soon as she. And the great big tears would come to his manly eyes. He bent his head down on his mother’s shoulder, and the hot drops fell on her cheek. She kissed the poor boy, and told him she should never mind. It would pour quite as well, and she should use it every morning. She knew how many months of his allowance had gone for this coffee-pot. She remembered how much she had been pleased with Mrs. Henry’s; and she praised Asaph for remembering that so well.
“This is the joy of the present,” she said, “that my boy watches his mother’s wishes, and that he thinks of her. A chip more or less off the nose of the coffee-pot is nothing.”
And Asaph would not cheat the others out of their “good time.” And he pretended to be soothed. But, all the same, there was a great lump in his throat almost all that day.
When the children were going to church he walked with Isabel, and he told her how it all happened. He would not tell his mother, and he made Isabel promise not to tell. He had spent every cent of his money in buying his presents. He had them all in that big basket which they bought at the Pier. He was coming home after dark, on foot, because he could not pay his fare in the horse-car. All of a sudden a little German boy with a tall woman by him, stopped him, and said with a very droll accent, which Asaph imitated, “East Canton street,” and poked out a card on which was written, “Karl Shoninger, 723 East Canton street.”
“Belle, I was in despair. It was late; I was on Dwight street, and I led them to Shawmut avenue and tried to explain. Belle, they did not know one word of English except ‘East Canton street.’ They kept saying, ‘East Canton street,’ as a dog says ‘Bow-wow.’ I looked for an officer and could not find one. It snowed harder and harder. I was coward enough to think of shirking. But then I said, ‘Lie and cheat on Christmas eve, that you may lug home your Christmas presents; that is too mean.’ And I said very loud, ‘Kom hier.’ I guess that’s good German any way. And I dragged them to their old 723 East Canton street. It is a mile if it is an inch. I climbed up the snowy steps to read the number. But I slipped as I came down, and knocked my own basket off the step where it stood. That is how mamma’s coffee-pot came broken, I suppose; but all looked so steady in the basket that I never thought of it then. That’s how I came late to supper. But, Belle, don’t you ever tell mamma as long as you live.”
And Belle never did. She told me.
