And he said, “Same to you!” and a big smile started and ran clear across his face and both ears wiggled pleasantly.
Then the dinner began to come in. First a turkey on a big platter, all trimmed up and so brown and shiny that it looked varnished. Next were all sorts of dishes of different things with covers over them to keep them hot, and you couldn’t begin to guess what was in them all. “A little more gravy over everything” or “Do have another drumstick,” Madam Iceberg would say.
Then finally they both leaned back in their chairs and didn’t eat any more. They talked about all sorts of things and asked each other questions, back and forth—and he asked her if she knew any stories!
She said: “You’re right I do, Mr. Sunny Face. Come, let’s go in by the fire and tell them there.”
So they took hold of hands and went.
[9] By special permission of Gertrude A. Kay and the “Ladies’ Home Journal.”
THE CHRISTMAS TREE[10]
Mary Austin
Eastward from the Sierras rises a strong red hill known as Pine Mountain, though the Indians call it The Hill of Summer Snow. At its foot stands a town of a hundred board houses, given over wholly to the business of mining. The noise of it goes on by day and night,—the creak of the windlasses, the growl of the stamps in the mill, the clank of the cars running down to the dump, and from the open doors of the drinking saloons, great gusts of laughter and the sound of singing. Billows of smoke roll up from the tall stacks and by night are lit ruddily by the smelter fires all going at a roaring blast.
Whenever the charcoal-burner’s son looked down on the red smoke, the glare, and the hot breath of the furnaces, it seemed to him like an exhalation from the wickedness that went on continually in the town; though all he knew of wickedness was the word, a rumor from passers-by, and a kind of childish fear. The charcoal-burner’s cabin stood on a spur of Pine Mountain two thousand feet above the town, and sometimes the boy went down to it on the back of the laden burros when his father carried charcoal to the furnaces. All else that he knew were the wild creatures of the mountain, the trees, the storms, the small flowering things, and away at the back of his heart a pale memory of his mother like the faint forest odor that clung to the black embers of the pine. They had lived in the town when the mother was alive and the father worked in the mines. There were not many women or children in the town at that time, but mining men jostling with rude quick ways; and the young mother was not happy.