“Might as well settle down for a good visit while we’re waiting,” I says to Mis’ Holcomb, and she made her eyebrows sympathize.
No sooner was we stood up, neat and in line, than in come three folks that was total strangers to me and to the village as well. One was a young girl around twenty, with eyes kind of laughing at everything, dressed in blue, with ermine on her hat and an ermine muff as big as one of my spare-room pillows, and three big fresh pink roses on her coat. And one was a youngish fellow, some older than her, in a gray cap, and having no use of his eyes—being they were kept right close on the lady in blue. And the other, I judged, was her father—a nice, jolly, private Santa Claus, in a fur-lined coat. They were in a tearing hurry to get to the general-delivery window, but when they saw the line, and how there was only one window for mail and stamps and all, they fell in behind us, as nice as we was ourselves.
“Let me take you out and you wait in the car, Alison,” says the youngish man, anxious.
“Hadn’t you better, dear?” says her father, careful.
“Why, but I love this!” she says. “Isn’t it quaint?” And she laughed again.
Now, I hate that word quaint. So does Mis’ Holcomb. It always sounds to us like last year’s styles. So though her and I had been looking at the three strangers—that we saw were merely passing through in an automobile, like the whole country seems to—with some interest, we both turned our backs and went on visiting and listening to the rest.
“I’ve got three more to get presents for,” says Mis’ Merriman in that before-Christmas conversation that everybody takes a hand at, “and what to get them I do not know. Don’t you ever get up a stump about presents?”
“Stump!” says Libby Liberty, “I live on a stump from the time I start till I stick on the last stamp.”
“I’ve got two more on my list,” Mis’ Wiswell says, worried, “and it don’t seem as if I could take another stitch nor buy another spoon, hat-pin or paper-knife. But I know they’ll send me something, both of them.”
I stood looking at us, tired to death with what we’d been a-making, but sending ’em off with a real lot of love and satisfaction wrapped up in ’em, too. And I thought how we covered up Christmas so deep with work that we hardly ever had time to get at the real Christmas down underneath all the stitches. And yet, there we were, having dropped everything else that we were doing, just because it was Christmas week, and coming from all over town with little things we had made, and standing there in line to send ’em off to folks. And I thought of all the other folks in all the other post-offices in the world, doing the self-same thing that night. And I felt all kind of nice and glowing to think I was one of ’em. Only I did begin to wish we were enough civilized to get the glow some other way.