The best child opened the door cautiously, half afraid, and set up a shout. “Ma, come quick! here’s a chicken, and cranberries, and a paper,—it’s raisins!”
“Raisins!” screamed the other children.
“A chicken!” cried old Mrs. Nutcracker.
“Christmas wreaths!” exclaimed his wife, peeping out into the little dark hall. “Why, surely, you never——”
“Made them? Yes, I did,” said Buttons, his eyes dancing. “In the woods. The cedars gave me boughs for nothing.”
“Christmas wreaths!” repeated Pepin from his bed. “Give me one,” and, seizing it in his thin fingers, “Ah! how nice it smells,—like the woods!” he said, laying his pale cheek on it. “I wish I could see a tree once more.”
Buttons jumped up and ran downstairs very fast, and they heard him coming back dragging something after him, bump, bump! The something rustled and cracked and filled the room with a strong, spicy scent of the woods. Buttons lifted it so that it stood just in front of Pepin’s bed. It was a spruce-tree. Its thick, strong branches spread out wide. Its top brushed the ceiling. Birds had built nests in its branches, mosses had lived about its roots. It knew all the secrets of the woods and the sky and the rains, and it told you about them, as well as it could, whenever you stirred its branches. The little wife hung the wreaths all about the room,—one on every nail, one over each window, one over Pepin, one each on the backs of grandpa’s and grandma’s chairs. It was getting dark, and the firelight came out and danced on the ceiling and on the white cover of the little table. Pepin lay looking at the tree. The children chattered like little birds; even Grandpa and Grandma Nutcracker were smiling. The room was like a spicy cosy little nest. What was it, Nutcracker wondered more and more, here in these people’s faces for which he had laboured all his life?
Suddenly Pepin cried out, “O, there is something here hanging on a branch of the tree!”
“Is it possible?” answered Buttons. “Then you had better take it down, Pepin.”
Pepin took it down. “Why, it is for me,” he said, looking at the name on the wrapper.