When the Christmas dances were half over; when they had acted Lochinvar and Lord Ullin’s Daughter, but before they acted Villekens and Johnny the Miller, supper was served in Mrs. Sheafe’s dining-room. All the best china was out. Grandmamma’s “Spode” was out, and the silver pitcher the hands gave papa on his fiftieth birthday; and Mrs. Sheafe’s wedding breakfast-set—all that was left of it; and Asaph’s coffee-pot held the place of honor. One wretched bit of broken ware had consented to be cemented in its place. But yet it was but a miserable nose, and the lump came into Asaph’s throat again as he looked at it. And he almost wished his mother had put it away so that he need not hear her tell uncle Eliakim the hateful story.
The lump was in his throat when he went to bed. But he fell asleep soon after. I must confess that there were a few wet spots on his pillow. His last thought was the memory that all his hoarded monthly allowances had gone for the purchase of a broken-nosed pitcher.
The two angels who watch his bedside saw this, and one of them said to the other, “Would you not tell him?” But the other said, “Wait a little longer.”
What the angels would not tell him I will tell you. For it happened that I was driving round in my sleigh that Christmas night, on the very snow which was falling, while Asaph was fumbling up the steps in East Canton street, and I stopped at a house not far from Boylston station as you turn into Lamartine street, and found myself in the midst of the drollest home festivity.
The father was sitting with two babies on his knee. The other children were delving in a trunk to find something which would stay in the bottom. The house-mother clearly did not know where anything was in the trunk or anywhere else. But a broad grin was on every face, and whatever was said was broken by ejaculations and occasional kisses.
At last the lost parcel revealed itself, and opened out into some balls for a Christmas-tree, which these honest people had brought all the way from Linz on the Danube, quite sure that no such wonders would be known in that far-off America.
There are many other tales to be printed in this volume, so that I must not tell you, as I should be glad to do, all the adventures that that house-mother and her three boys and her two girls and the twin babies had encountered as they came from Linz to join Hans Bergmann, the father of the seven and the husband of their mother.