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A Christmas Mistake
by
“When I’m a man,” announced Teddy with dignity, “I’d just like to see you put me in the porch. And I mean to have turkey all the time and I won’t give you any, either.”
“All right, you greedy small boy. Only take yourself off to school now, and let us hear no more squeaks out of you. Tramp, all of you, and give Mother a chance to get her work done.”
Mrs. Grant got up and fell to work at her dishes with a brighter face.
“Well, we mustn’t give in; perhaps things will be better after a while. I’ll make a famous bread pudding, and you can boil some molasses taffy and ask those little Smithsons next door to help you pull it. They won’t whine for turkey, I’ll be bound. I don’t suppose they ever tasted such a thing in all their lives. If I could afford it, I’d have had them all in to dinner with us. That sermon Mr. Evans preached last Sunday kind of stirred me up. He said we ought always to try and share our Christmas joy with some poor souls who had never learned the meaning of the word. I can’t do as much as I’d like to. It was different when your father was alive.”
The noisy group grew silent as they always did when their father was spoken of. He had died the year before, and since his death the little family had had a hard time. Keith, to hide his feelings, began to hector the rest.
“Mary Alice, do hurry up. Here, you twin nuisances, get off to school. If you don’t you’ll be late and then the master will give you a whipping.”
“He won’t,” answered the irrepressible Teddy. “He never whips us, he doesn’t. He stands us on the floor sometimes, though,” he added, remembering the many times his own chubby legs had been seen to better advantage on the school platform.
“That man,” said Mrs. Grant, alluding to the teacher, “makes me nervous. He is the most abstracted creature I ever saw in my life. It is a wonder to me he doesn’t walk straight into the river some day. You’ll meet him meandering along the street, gazing into vacancy, and he’ll never see you nor hear a word you say half the time.”
“Yesterday,” said Gordon, chuckling over the remembrance, “he came in with a big piece of paper he’d picked up on the entry floor in one hand and his hat in the other–and he stuffed his hat into the coal-scuttle and hung up the paper on a nail as grave as you please. Never knew the difference till Ned Slocum went and told him. He’s always doing things like that.”
Keith had collected his books and now marched his brothers and sisters off to school. Left alone with the baby, Mrs. Grant betook herself to her work with a heavy heart. But a second interruption broke the progress of her dish-washing.
“I declare,” she said, with a surprised glance through the window, “if there isn’t that absent-minded schoolteacher coming through the yard! What can he want? Dear me, I do hope Teddy hasn’t been cutting capers in school again.”
For the teacher’s last call had been in October and had been occasioned by the fact that the irrepressible Teddy would persist in going to school with his pockets filled with live crickets and in driving them harnessed to strings up and down the aisle when the teacher’s back was turned. All mild methods of punishment having failed, the teacher had called to talk it over with Mrs. Grant, with the happy result that Teddy’s behaviour had improved–in the matter of crickets at least.
But it was about time for another outbreak. Teddy had been unnaturally good for too long a time. Poor Mrs. Grant feared that it was the calm before a storm, and it was with nervous haste that she went to the door and greeted the young teacher.