Jim Burns, a man of few words and short, cleared his throat and, without preamble, started "The Mistletoe Bough":
The mistletoe hung in the old oak hall,
The holly-branch shone on the castle wa-all,
The bar'n's ree-tainers was blith' an' ga-ay
A-keepin' their Chris'mas ho-oliday;
O Mistletoe Bough!
O Mistletoe Bough!
There is something "catchy" about the words and the tune of this old song of a famous tragedy, whose human interest has carried it as far around the world as "Home, Sweet Home". Ware had heard it in his nursery when it was reasonably new. He joined in it now, with a vigor that fended off the dolor of the stormy sunset and the inching sleigh on its high lonely trail. Nixon swung his whip in time; even a diffident humming came from the shawl that wrapped the head of Mrs. Lovina Nixon.
After the refrain following the last stanza was concluded, Jim Burns, on his own initiative, started his favorite, the "Blizzard Song of Meadowlea." It is a characteristic of prairie people to sing or to talk about an especially gloomy phase of a present situation. The person who has newly contracted rheumatism, for instance, is told glowingly by a sympathetic visitor that, "Hank McCaffrey, he took it in the knee—just where you got it, Joe—an' he's a-settin' on the same chair yit, an' that's ten years ago." And if Mrs. Pelkey, on the northwest quarter of Section Twenty-three, sneezes after peppering the meat in the frying-pan, Mrs. Mair, over from the northeast quarter to borrow flour for a baking of bread, remarks, "This is a bad season for to catch a cold, Bella—right in the spring o' the year. I never saw a person yet that tot'ly threw off a cold they caught in the month of Ape-rile."