FullReads

Amiable! Yes,–after her way. And a very noiseless sort of way it was, too. For, though she had lived with the deacon for nearly a dozen years, he had never known her to so far forget her propriety as to indulge in anything more hearty and hilarious than the most decorous of smiles, which smile was such a kind of illumination to her face as a star of inconceivably small magnitude makes to the sky in trailing across it.

Of her personal appearance I will say–nothing. Sacred let it be to memory! If you ever saw her, or one like her, whether full front or profile, whether sideways or edgewise, the vision, I am ready to swear, remains with you vividly still. Let it suffice, then, when I observe that Miss Miranda was not physically stout, and that the deacon’s standing joke was by no means a bad one when he described her as “not actually burdened with fat.” Yes, she was a very cleanly, very thin, very prudent, very particular person, that never joined in any sports or amusements; never joked or participated in any happy events in a happy, joyous fashion, but lived unobtrusively, and, I may say, coldly, in her own prim, cold, bloodless, little world.

“Gracious me!” exclaimed the deacon, as he looked at the package. “Gracious me! what has got into Mirandy?” And he looked scrutinizingly at the little, fine, thin, faintly-traced inscription on the package, as if the writer had begrudged the ink that must be expended on the letters, or from a subtle and mystic self-sympathy had made the chirography faint, delicate, and attenuated as her own self.

“Gracious me!” reiterated Deacon Tubman, as he proceeded to untie the knot in the pale blue ribbon smoothly bound around the package. “Who ever knew Mirandy to make a present before?” and the deacon was so surprised at what had taken place that, for a moment, he doubted the evidence of his own senses. “And put it in my boot, too, ha, ha!” And the deacon stopped undoing the parcel, and, lying back in the chair, roared at the thought of the prim, modest, particular Miranda perpetrating such a joke. And when the wrapping of the package was at last undone, for every corner and crease of it was as carefully turned and as sharply edged as if the smoothing iron had passed over them,–will wonders ever cease in this startling world of ours?–out dropped a night-cap! Yes, a night-cap, delicately and deftly crocheted in warm, woolen stuff of a rich cardinal color.

“Ha, ha,” laughed the deacon, as he held the cap between his thumb and forefinger of one hand up before his eyes, while he rubbed his bald crown with the other. “Good for Mirandy.” And then, as a small slip of white paper fluttered to the floor, he seized it, and read:

[Handwritten: A happy New Year
to Deacon Tubman
from Miranda.]

“A good girl, a good girl,” said the deacon, “not overburdened with fat, but a good girl!” and with this rather equivocal compliment to the donor, with his boot in one hand and the cap in the other, he rushed impulsively to the stairway and shouted:

“A happy New Year to you, Mirandy. God bless you; God bless you,” and he swung the boot, instead of the cap, vigorously over his head, while his round, rosy face beamed down the stairway into the cold hall below, like a warm harvest moon over the autumnal stubble.

In response to the deacon’s hearty, and, I may say, somewhat uproarious greeting, the kitchen door timidly opened, and Miranda, who had been astir for nearly an hour and had the table already laid for breakfast, stepped into view, and, with a smile on her face that actually broadened its thinness dangerously near to the proportions of a genial and happy reciprocation of the jovial greeting, dropped a courtesy, and said: