“Huh! well! see that now! My nose’s out of joint,” said the Western Uncle John, with a laugh, indicating the children. “I never heard of a thing like this—never. It’s a most astonishing thing—really, now. But I can’t blame you.” He offered his hand to John James. “I don’t see but we’ll have to get acquainted. It’s a great comfort, too, to know that I resemble such a good-looking man!” He scrutinized John James closely. “It almost reconciles me to the loss of my turkey dinner.”
“But you shan’t lose it!” protested Aunt Sarah, amid the babel of tongues wherewith they welcomed the Western uncle afresh, and sought to assure John James of their entire forgiveness and acceptance of him as one of the family. And straightway one of the cousins dragged Uncle John away to the table, with intent to satisfy his hunger, and incidentally to lay before him a history of the whole affair.
Later on, the business of Christmas enjoyment was resumed with—if possible—greater zest than ever; and when, at a shockingly late hour, John James repaired to the mountainous bed in the little room, he knew that peace and good-will were more than mere names, and that he never should repent of the audacious performance which had won him a whole family of country relatives. And while just dropping off to sleep, it came to him that it would be well to look up those Connecticut cousins before next Christmas, and find out what they were like.
[8] Reprinted from “St. Nicholas Magazine,” with permission.
BUNNY FACE AND THE SPIRIT OF
CHRISTMAS[9]
Gertrude A. Kay
He was such a very little boy and everything about him was pale—hair, eyes, ears, everything. But even though his face was so peaked, his big ears were what you noticed first, and we soon discovered that he could move them most surprisingly—backward and forward. This was something that none of the rest of us could do. It was for this reason probably that we began calling him Bunny Face.
He didn’t have a family, like other children. I don’t know to this day where he came from, but he lived with a woman that he called aunt, whenever he called her anything. But she played very little part in his life, and some folks said that she wasn’t his aunt at all. But our mothers said that this was being inquisitive and told us never, never to say such a thing to Bunny Face. But the grown-ups always stopped talking about it when we were around, so of course we knew there was some more which they never would tell us. Anyway, the aunt’s name was Katie Duckworth, and she had it painted in big letters over her dry-goods store downtown. It was a tiny little store and crowded and dark inside. She was sort of blind and never could find the things that your mother sent you there to buy. There were some folks who said she wasn’t very bright. But to this day, whenever I smell gingham it makes me think of Katie Duckworth and her little dry-goods store.
Although they seemed to get along all right, Bunny Face and his aunt never fixed up in their best clothes and went off together a-hold of hands, as the rest of us did with our mothers or our aunts. But then poor Bunny Face didn’t have any other clothes; though, goodness knows, that didn’t worry him at all. His aunt never sent him to Sunday school and didn’t bother at all when the teacher told her that he played truant. But Bunny Face was good-natured; and if you had ever seen a smile start on his face and spread all over it till it made his ears wiggle, you would have smiled, too, no matter what.
“Why is a goblin, or why isn’t a goblin?” He was fond of asking the rest of us questions like that, and then he would laugh and laugh, just as if he knew the answer himself. He often told us long stories about places he’d been and queer things he’d done, and though we knew that they had never really happened, we didn’t care.