Who ate the pink sweetmeat?

“If there is a cottage I shall be glad of five minutes’ rest by the fire-side,” says Cecil who is beginning to get decidedly “blown.”

“I was just thinking what an awfully lonely road this was.”

“Jack Brown is a surly fellow,” whispers Bertie in his ear, but not so low but that the man catches the last words.

“Surly! And who wouldn’t be, young master, I’d like to know, in my place? Didn’t the Squire have me up for poaching, and didn’t I get three weeks in jail along of snaring a few worthless pheasants? Much he or anyone would have cared if my old mother had starved the while!”

“For shame!” Bertie’s wrath is making him quite energetic. “As if mother and Mildred didn’t go to see the old woman nearly every day, and make sure she wanted for nothing.”

“Well, well,” interrupts Cecil, “don’t rake up bye-gones on Christmas Eve of all days in the year. Forgive and forget – peace and goodwill – that’s what the bells always seem to me to be saying. I say, my friend, I’m sure your Mother would be willing to let the young master sit by her fire for five minutes, after he’s nearly got himself killed – and buried too – riding to Appleton to do his sister and cousin a good turn.”

A shadow of a smile lurks on Jack’s grim visage at this appeal, and he proceeds to lead the way across a difficult “hog-backed” stile, over which he helps to lift Bertie with more gentleness than might be expected. Then striding before them through the snow, which is more even, and easy to wade through in the open field, he presently stops at the door of a little thatched cottage which is opened by a tidy old woman.

Bertie is soon established in her own high-backed wooden chair by the fire, drinking hot if somewhat hay-scented tea, and obtaining great relief from the attentions his friend is now better able to bestow upon the injured foot. Meanwhile this is becoming a very sad Christmas Eve to the anxious watchers at Edenhurst. The Squire has returned home, puzzled and half incredulous at the confused report of Master Bertie’s disappearance which has reached him, but when the snow-soaked saddle and the riderless pony have been shown him, he too grows seriously alarmed, and without waiting to change his wet things sets off in the direction of Appleton.

Other messengers have already been despatched but the hours pass by and no news is obtained, no one happening to think of the short cut and old Mrs. Brown’s cottage. Even the bells are mute – the villagers cannot bear to ring them when their dear lady is in such trouble. She is trying hard to force herself to believe that nothing can be so very wrong – it is foolish to be so over-anxious.

No one has any heart to carry on the joyous preparations for Christmas in which Bertie usually bears an active part, but Mrs. Chetwynd will not let the poor people suffer, and their gifts of warm clothing and tea and sugar are all looked over and carefully ticketed by Mildred and Alice.

Poor girls! they have little spirit for the work, but it is better for them than the dreary waiting which follows. At last Alice can bear it no longer. She throws a cloak round her and steals out into the avenue. The air is clearer now and the snow has ceased to fall. The earth is covered with a brilliant white sheet, and overhead the wintry stars are shining out one by one in the deep blue vault. The girl begins to feel more hopeful, as the still frosty air cools her hot cheek, and the stars look down upon her with their silent greeting of peace.

“Glad tidings of great joy” – the Christmas message of nearly nineteen centuries ago – surely it cannot be that a heart-breaking grief is to come on them on this, of all nights in the year! A prayer is in her heart – on her lips – and even in that moment, as if in answer, there burst forth the most joyous of all sounds to Alice’s ear – their own village bells ringing a Merry Christmas peal! It had been understood that this was to be the signal of Bertie’s being found and safe. Louder and louder it comes, and eager congratulations are exchanged by the anxious watchers. Mrs. Chetwynd wants to fly to meet her boy, but is gently restrained by Mildred, who reminds her that his father must be with him. Nor is it long before a happy group are seen approaching.

There is Bertie (who has insisted on putting his injured foot to the ground lest his mother should be frightened by seeing him carried) bravely hopping along with the aid of his father’s strong arm faithful little Nettle trotting close at his side and Jack Brown, with whom the Squire has shaken hands and exchanged a “Merry Christmas” slouching behind – but whose is the tall figure on Bertie’s other side? Ah! cousin Mildred knows, and well is it perhaps that the growing darkness throws a friendly veil over the joyous blushes and the happy thankful tears that mark that meeting.

ASAPH SHEAFE’S CHRISTMAS

Asaph had just the Christmas presents he wanted. “Wanted” is hardly the word: he had not supposed that a boy like him could have such things for his own. His father and mother gave him one present, it was a camera obscura, and thirty glass plates all ready to take photographic views. They were made to work by the new dry process, so that, without over-nice manipulation of chemicals, Asaph could go where he pleased and make his own photographs.

What the children gave him I must not tell, we have so little room. But, of all the children in Boston who had their Christmas presents at breakfast, none was better pleased than Asaph as he opened his parcels.

It was afterwards that his grief and sorrow came. When his mother’s turn came, and she opened the parcels on her table, for in the Sheafe house each of them had a separate present-table, after she had passed the little children’s she came to Asaph’s present to her. It was in quite a large box done up in a German newspaper. She opened it carefully, and lifted out a Bohemian coffee-pot, which Asaph had bought at the German woman’s shop in Shawmut avenue. Mrs. Sheafe eagerly expressed her delight, and her wonder that Asaph knew she wanted it. But alas! all her love could not hide the fact that the nose of the coffee-pot was broken at the end, and what was left was all in splinters.

Poor Asaph saw it as soon as she. And the great big tears would come to his manly eyes. He bent his head down on his mother’s shoulder, and the hot drops fell on her cheek. She kissed the poor boy, and told him she should never mind. It would pour quite as well, and she should use it every morning. She knew how many months of his allowance had gone for this coffee-pot. She remembered how much she had been pleased with Mrs. Henry’s; and she praised Asaph for remembering that so well.

“This is the joy of the present,” she said, “that my boy watches his mother’s wishes, and that he thinks of her. A chip more or less off the nose of the coffee-pot is nothing.”

And Asaph would not cheat the others out of their “good time.” And he pretended to be soothed. But, all the same, there was a great lump in his throat almost all that day.

When the children were going to church he walked with Isabel, and he told her how it all happened. He would not tell his mother, and he made Isabel promise not to tell. He had spent every cent of his money in buying his presents. He had them all in that big basket which they bought at the Pier. He was coming home after dark, on foot, because he could not pay his fare in the horse-car. All of a sudden a little German boy with a tall woman by him, stopped him, and said with a very droll accent, which Asaph imitated, “East Canton street,” and poked out a card on which was written, “Karl Shoninger, 723 East Canton street.”

“Belle, I was in despair. It was late; I was on Dwight street, and I led them to Shawmut avenue and tried to explain. Belle, they did not know one word of English except ‘East Canton street.’ They kept saying, ‘East Canton street,’ as a dog says ‘Bow-wow.’ I looked for an officer and could not find one. It snowed harder and harder. I was coward enough to think of shirking. But then I said, ‘Lie and cheat on Christmas eve, that you may lug home your Christmas presents; that is too mean.’ And I said very loud, ‘Kom hier.’ I guess that’s good German any way. And I dragged them to their old 723 East Canton street. It is a mile if it is an inch. I climbed up the snowy steps to read the number. But I slipped as I came down, and knocked my own basket off the step where it stood. That is how mamma’s coffee-pot came broken, I suppose; but all looked so steady in the basket that I never thought of it then. That’s how I came late to supper. But, Belle, don’t you ever tell mamma as long as you live.”

And Belle never did. She told me.

When the Christmas dances were half over; when they had acted Lochinvar and Lord Ullin’s Daughter, but before they acted Villekens and Johnny the Miller, supper was served in Mrs. Sheafe’s dining-room. All the best china was out. Grandmamma’s “Spode” was out, and the silver pitcher the hands gave papa on his fiftieth birthday; and Mrs. Sheafe’s wedding breakfast-set – all that was left of it; and Asaph’s coffee-pot held the place of honor. One wretched bit of broken ware had consented to be cemented in its place. But yet it was but a miserable nose, and the lump came into Asaph’s throat again as he looked at it. And he almost wished his mother had put it away so that he need not hear her tell uncle Eliakim the hateful story.

The lump was in his throat when he went to bed. But he fell asleep soon after. I must confess that there were a few wet spots on his pillow. His last thought was the memory that all his hoarded monthly allowances had gone for the purchase of a broken-nosed pitcher.

The two angels who watch his bedside saw this, and one of them said to the other, “Would you not tell him?” But the other said, “Wait a little longer.”

What the angels would not tell him I will tell you. For it happened that I was driving round in my sleigh that Christmas night, on the very snow which was falling, while Asaph was fumbling up the steps in East Canton street, and I stopped at a house not far from Boylston station as you turn into Lamartine street, and found myself in the midst of the drollest home festivity.

The father was sitting with two babies on his knee. The other children were delving in a trunk to find something which would stay in the bottom. The house-mother clearly did not know where anything was in the trunk or anywhere else. But a broad grin was on every face, and whatever was said was broken by ejaculations and occasional kisses.

At last the lost parcel revealed itself, and opened out into some balls for a Christmas-tree, which these honest people had brought all the way from Linz on the Danube, quite sure that no such wonders would be known in that far-off America.

There are many other tales to be printed in this volume, so that I must not tell you, as I should be glad to do, all the adventures that that house-mother and her three boys and her two girls and the twin babies had encountered as they came from Linz to join Hans Bergmann, the father of the seven and the husband of their mother.

He had come the year before. They had come now by the way of Antwerp, and had landed in Philadelphia. But the Schiller had made so short a run that, when they arrived, Hans Bergmann was not in Philadelphia to meet them. Of course the Frau Bergmann should have waited in Philadelphia as Hans Bergmann had bidden her. But, on the hint of a voluble woman who spoke pure Bohemian, whom she met on the pier – who knew just where he boarded in New York – she took her charge to New York, to find that he had left that boarding-house three months before. Still, eager to spend Christmas with him, she had hurried to Boston to ask his uncle where he was. She had arrived in Boston, with the snow-storm, the day before Christmas itself, having made an accidental detour by Bridgeport and Westfield. Happily for her, the boy Asaph had led her to uncle Karl’s lodgings just as uncle Karl was leaving them forever on his way to Chicago.

Happily for Hans Bergmann, uncle Karl had the wit to pile them all into a carriage and to send them to a friend of his at the Boylston station, bidding him keep them under lock and key.

Then to Hans Bergmann uncle Karl telegraphed: “Find your wife at Burr street, number 40, Boylston station.”

Then Hans Bergmann, who had been bullying every police station in New York to know where his family was, had taken the early train and had spent his Christmas in ploughing through snow-drifts to Boston.

And so it was, that, at nine on Christmas night, I saw the children in a Christmas party, not quite as well arranged, but quite as happy, as any I saw that day.

And all this came about because a kind Asaph Sheafe forgot himself on Christmas eve, and showed Frau Bergmann the way to East Canton street.

As it happened, I saw the diamond necklace that John Gilder gave his bride that night.

But it did not give so much pleasure as Asaph Sheafe’s Christmas present to the Bergmanns did.

And yet he never knew he gave it.