the evening in question she said no more, but the night brought counsel, and next morning she informed her husband that she had decided what to do. She would buy the presents as usual, but she would wait, before sending them on Christmas morning, to see whether Mrs. Martin sent to her. “And if I do not need them, I can put them up for the children next Christmas,” she concluded triumphantly.
Dr. Spencer did not approve of this ingenious plan, but his wife persisted. “Not for worlds” would she have a great lot of presents come over from the Martins’ and have nothing to send in return.
Christmas morning came, and, while dressing, Mrs. Spencer told her husband that she should send little Jack out on the front sidewalk with his fire-crackers, so that he could keep a lookout down the street and report any basket coming from the Martins’.
Hers was packed and ready. Every bundle was neatly tied up in white paper with ribbons and labeled: “Mrs. Martin, with Christmas greetings”; “For Little Charley, with Mrs. Spencer’s love”; “Mammy Sue, from the Spencer children”; and so on. And Mrs. Spencer reflected with satisfaction, as she deposited a new harness for the Martins’ pug on top of the pile, that nobody was going to get ahead of her.
Breakfast over, and Remus, the doctor’s “boy,” instructed to keep himself brushed and neat, ready at an instant’s notice to seize “the Martin basket,” as the doctor called it, and bear it forth, Mrs. Spencer’s mind was at rest. Jack was on the sidewalk, banging away, but keeping a sharp eye out toward the Martins’, too; for he had scarcely been there five minutes before he called to her that Robbie Martin was playing on his sidewalk and watching their house like anything.
A short time passed, and Jack came running in. “Mother, I see Mammy Sue coming this way with a tray,” he said.
The doctor called from his study: “How do you know she is coming here?” But Mrs. Spencer had not waited to hear him; she was already at the back door calling excitedly, “Remus, take the basket!”
“John,” she cried, running back, “you see the Martins are sending us presents,” and she got to the window in time to see Remus issuing forth with his burden. As he reached the street and turned toward the Martins’, into the house rushed Robbie, calling, “Mother! Mother!” and a moment later out popped the Martins’ butler, Tom, with a large basket brimming over with tissue-paper and blue ribbons on his head, and took his way toward the Spencers’ at a brisk trot. It was quite a race between him and Remus; they grinned cheerfully as they passed each other half-way. Mammy Sue went by the gate with her tray, but Tom came in and set his load down in the hall, where Mrs. Spencer received it with a smile as fine as a wire.
A few minutes later the doctor came out of his study. His wife, her lips pressed together and her eyes very bright, was kneeling beside the basket, handing out be-ribboned packages to the children, who were exclaiming about her. He stood looking on in silence until she handed him one marked, “For Dr. Spencer, with Mrs. Martin’s kindest wishes,” which he opened.
“Beautiful!” he said. “Just what I have always needed. My office wanted only a pink china Cupid, with a gilt basket on his back, to be complete.”
Mrs. Spencer made no reply, nor did she look up; her hands fluttered among the parcels. The doctor considered the top of her head for a moment.
“Ellen,” he said gently, “there was just one little mistake in our calculations: we never thought of Mrs. Martin’s being as clever as we are, did we?”
Mrs. Spencer looked up and laughed, but her face quivered.
“John,” she said, “I’ll always love you for that ‘we’.”
HOW “SANDY CLAWS” TREATED POP BAKER, by Elizabeth Cherry Waltz (1866-1903)
In 1863, Thomas Nast illustrated Clement C. Moore’s “A Visit from St Nicholas,” and Santa Claus became widely accepted as the character of the modern Christmas. The main character in this story, Pop Baker, was too old to have heard about Santa Claus in his youth. This story describes Pop’s first experience of Christmas with Santa Claus.
It is certain that Pop Baker never heard of Santa Claus in the days of his early youth. He was over seventy years old, although no one would ever have guessed it. When he was a yellow-haired urchin he was as far away from civilization as are the inhabitants of Central Africa nowadays. Louisville was a prosperous community in the early thirties of the nineteenth century,—one where the brother of the poet Keats and other scholars found polished and congenial society,—and it was only twelve miles away; but the way to it from the highlands far south of the city was over swampy morasses and through vast stretches of the “Wet Woods,” forests so dense that even the Indians turned aside from them. There grew numerous ash-trees and the larger forest monarchs, and all were so thickly set together that the white man did not force his way through them for a century. Beyond then lay the hills, huge shoulders and boulders; and here Pop Baker was born, and here he lived in 1902.
Over seventy years old was he, very tall and very straight and broad-shouldered, and slightly silvered of hair and chin-beard. Also he was rosy-faced and merry-eyed. Fate had found him a hard nut to crack, and left him at the end of the span of man’s life unscathed and wholesome. He had been married twice at least. He had several children, of whom “Doc” and “Jimpsey” remained on this mundane sphere, shiftless hill-billies, with none of the old man’s grit or philosophy. Another, a daughter, Mahale by name, had achieved notoriety by the accumulation of nine children in a dozen years. She departed this life “’thout doin’ no more dammidge,” Pop said, “than ter leave seven livin’.” The “seven livin‘” proved for half a dozen years the old man’s burden. He mothered them, and he allowed the father, Pete Mason, to live under his own roof. But when “leetle Pop” was six yeas old, his grandsire decided on a course of action, and was prompt indeed about it. He caught Pete at the rail fence one morning when the latter was mounting a mule to ride off to Pausch’s Corners for an early bracer-up.
“Petey, I hear ye air goin’ reg’lar-like up ter Kuykendall’s. Thet air all right, but ye mought ez well be narratin’, over yan, thet ye’ve the seven livin’ ter pervide fer yit. I’m a-gittin’ ter thet time o’ life when I wanter hev a leetle freedom ’n’ enj’yment. Ye mought ez well let on ter whichever one of them gels ye‘re shinin’ up ter thet, ef she air bent on marryin’, she must tek the hull bunch ‘long wid ye.”
Peter narrowed his eyes.
“Ye mought mek a sheer-up,” he debated; “thar’s a hull lot o’ ’em.”
Pop Baker shook his head decidedly.
“I’m too old ter be raisin’ famblies,” he said, “an’ ye’ll hev ter rustle a leetle more yerself from this hyah time on, Petey. They air all on their feetses now, an’ rale fat an’ sassy. Ef one of them Kuykendall gels hain’t willin’, consort elsewhar. I calkilate ter give ye a mule, a bar’l o’ sorghum, an’ three feather beds fer the childern. Ye must do fer yerself with yer settin’ out from wharever ye marry any one.”
As Peter Mason was still a strapping, swaggering fellow, he had little difficulty in persuading Georgella Kuykendall to assume the position of stepmother to the “seven livin’” and wife to himself. The family removed themselves in the springtime clear over Mitchell’s Hill, and, under Georgella’s thrifty and energetic reign, got on fairly well.
For the first time in his life Pop Baker enjoyed the sweets of entire freedom. He fought off Jimpsey’s vehement offers to “keep house” and Doc’s inclination to make his home a half-way tavern between his own cabin and Pausch’s Corners. He had thirty acres to farm, two mules, and a cow. His house was part stone and part log, with a noble chimney of rough stone. He had wood and water and a garden.
All summer he reveled. He worked when he chose, he hitched up and rode around In a buckboard behind his best mule, whose name was Bully Boy. All his meat came from the woods—birds, rabbits, squirrels, racoons, and even a fat opossum now and then.
“Look at thet