But when Carl once found in his stocking a little board nailed upon four spools for wheels, and with no better tongue than a long piece of twine, his little tongue ran as fast as the spools, and he had brought his mother a very small load of chips in less than five minutes. And a small cake of maple-sugar, which somehow once found its way to the same depending toe, was a treasure quite too great to be weighed: though it measured only an inch and a half across, and though the maple-trees had grown about a foot since it was made.
“Wife,” said John Krinken, “what shall we put in little Carl’s stocking to-night?”
“Truly,” said his wife. “I do not know. Nevertheless we must find something, though there be but little in the house.”
And the wind swept round and round the old hut, and every cupboard-door rattled and said in an empty sort of way, “There is not much here.”
John Krinken and his wife lived on the coast, where they could hear every winter storm rage and beat, and where the wild sea sometimes brought wood for them and laid it at their very door. It was a drift-wood fire by which they sat now, this Christmas eve,—the crooked knee of some ship, and a bit of her keel, with nails and spikes rust-held in their places, and a piece of green board stuck under to light the whole. The andirons were two round stones, and the hearth was a flat one; and in front of the fire sat John Krinken on an old box making a fish-net, while a splinter chair upheld Mrs. Krinken and a half-mended red flannel shirt. An old chest between the two held patches and balls of twine; and the crooked knee, the keel, and the green board, were their only candles.
“We must find something,” repeated John. And pausing with his netting-needle half through the loop, he looked round towards one corner of the hut.
A clean rosy little face and a very complete set of thick curls rested there, in the very middle of the thin pillow and the hard bed; while the coverlet of blue check was tucked round and in, lest the drift-wood fire should not do its duty at that distance.
John Krinken and his wife refreshed themselves with a long look, and then returned to their work.