Christmas Every Day and Other Stories Part 6

"Oh, _do_ tell us about the Cowc.u.mber, and the Bullc.u.mber, and the little Calfc.u.mbers, papa!" the little girl entreated, and she clasped her hands, to show how anxious she was.

"What! And leave off at the most exciting part of the pumpkin-glory?"

The little girl saw what a mistake she had made; the boy just gave her _one look_, and she cowered down into the papa's lap, and the papa went on.

"Well, they had an extra big Thanksgiving at the farmer's that day. Lots of the relations came from out West; the grandmother, who was living with the farmer, was getting pretty old, and every year or two she thought she wasn't going to live very much longer, and she wrote to the relations in Wisconsin, and everywhere, that if they expected to see her alive again, they had better come this time, and bring all their families. She kept doing it till she was about ninety, and then she just concluded to live along and not mind how old she was. But this was just before her eighty-ninth birthday, and she had drummed up so many sons and sons-in-law, and daughters and daughters-in-law, and grandsons and great-grandsons, and granddaughters and great-granddaughters, that the house was perfectly packed with them. They had to sleep on the floor, a good many of them, and you could hardly step for them; the boys slept in the barn, and they laughed and cut up so the whole night that the roosters thought it was morning, and kept crowing till they made their throats sore, and had to wear wet compresses round them every night for a week afterwards."

When the papa said anything like this the children had a right to pound him, but they were so anxious not to have him stop, that this time they did not do it. They said, "Go on, go on!" and the little girl said, "And then the tables!"

"Tables? Well, I should think so! They got all the tables there were in the house, up stairs and down, for dinner Thanksgiving Day, and they took the grandmother's work-stand and put it at the head, and she sat down there; only she was so used to knitting by that table that she kept looking for her knitting-needles all through dinner, and couldn't seem to remember what it was she was missing. The other end of the table was the carpenter's bench that they brought in out of the barn, and they put the youngest and funniest papa at that. The tables stretched from the kitchen into the dining-room, and clear through that out into the hall, and across into the parlor. They hadn't table-cloths enough to go the whole length, and the end of the carpenter's bench, where the funniest papa sat, was bare, and all through dinner-time he kept making fun. The vise was right at the corner, and when he got his help of turkey, he pretended that it was so tough he had to fasten the bone in the vise, and cut the meat off with his knife like a draw-shave."

"It was the drumstick, I suppose, papa?" said the boy. "A turkey's drumstick is all full of little wooden splinters, anyway."

"And what did the mamma say?" asked the little girl.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "CAUGHT HIS TROUSERS ON A s.h.i.+NGLE-NAIL, AND STUCK."]

"Oh, she kept saying, 'Now you behave!' and, 'Well, I should think you'd be ashamed!' but the funniest papa didn't mind her a bit; and everybody laughed till they could hardly stand it. All this time the boys were out in the barn, waiting for the second table, and playing round. The farmer's boy went up to his room over the wood-shed, and got in at the garret window, and brought out the pumpkin-glory. Only he began to slip when he was coming down the roof, and he'd have slipped clear off if he hadn't caught his trousers on a s.h.i.+ngle-nail, and stuck. It made a pretty bad tear, but the other boys pinned it up so that it wouldn't show, and the pumpkin-glory wasn't hurt a bit. They all said that it was about the best jack-o'-lantern they almost ever saw, on account of the long neck there was to it; and they made a plan to stick the end of the neck into the top of the pump, and have fun hearing what the folks would say when they came out after dark and saw it all lit up; and then they noticed the pigpen at the corner of the barn, and began to plague the pig, and so many of them got up on the pen that they broke the middle board off; and they didn't like to nail it on again because it was Thanksgiving Day, and you mustn't hammer or anything; so they just stuck it up in its place with a piece of wood against it, and the boy said he would fix it in the morning.

"The grown folks stayed so long at the table that it was nearly dark when the boys got to it, and they would have been almost starved if the farm-boy hadn't brought out apples and doughnuts every little while. As it was, they were pretty hungry, and they began on the pumpkin pie at once, so as to keep eating till the mother and the other mothers that were helping could get some of the things out of the oven that they had been keeping hot for the boys. The pie was so nice that they kept eating at it all along, and the mother told them about the good little pumpkin that it was made of, and how the good little pumpkin had never had any wish from the time it was nothing but a seed, except to grow up and be made into pies and eaten at Thanksgiving; and they must all try to be good, too, and grow up and do likewise. The boys didn't say anything, because their mouths were so full, but they looked at each other and winked their left eyes. There were about forty or fifty of them, and when they all winked their left eyes it made it so dark you could hardly see; and the mother got the lamp; but the other mothers saw what the boys were doing, and they just shook them till they opened their eyes and stopped their mischief."

"Show how they looked!" said the boy.

"I can't show how fifty boys looked," said the papa. "But they looked a good deal like the pumpkin-glory that was waiting quietly in the barn for them to get through, and come out and have some fun with it. When they had all eaten so much that they could hardly stand up, they got down from the table, and grabbed their hats, and started for the door.

But they had to go out the back way, because the table took up the front entry, and that gave the farmer's boy a chance to find a piece of candle out in the kitchen and some matches; and then they rushed to the barn. It was so dark there already that they thought they had better light up the pumpkin-glory and try it. They lit it up, and it worked splendidly; but they forgot to put out the match, and it caught some straw on the barn floor, and a little more and it would have burnt the barn down. The boys stamped the fire out in about half a second; and after that they waited till it was dark outside before they lit up the pumpkin-glory again. Then they all bent down over it to keep the wind from blowing the match anywhere, and pretty soon it was lit up, and the farmer's boy took the pumpkin-glory by its long neck, and stuck the point in the hole in the top of the pump; and just then the funniest papa came round the corner of the wood-house, and said:

"'What have you got there, boys? Jack-o'-lantern? Well, well. That's a good one!'

"He came up and looked at the pumpkin-glory, and he bent back and he bent forward, and he doubled down and he straightened up, and laughed till the boys thought he was going to kill himself.

"They had all intended to burst into an Indian yell, and dance round the pumpkin-glory; but the funniest papa said, 'Now all you fellows keep still half a minute,' and the next thing they knew he ran into the house, and came out, walking his wife before him with both his hands over her eyes. Then the boys saw he was going to have some fun with her, and they kept as still as mice, and waited till he walked her up to the pumpkin-glory; and she was saying all the time, 'Now, John, if this is some of your fooling, I'll _give_ it to you.' When he got her close up he took away his hands, and she gave a kind of a whoop, and then she began to laugh, the pumpkin-glory _was_ so funny, and to chase the funniest papa all round the yard to box his ears, and as soon as she had boxed them she said, 'Now let's go in and send the rest out,' and in about a quarter of a second all the other papas came out, holding their hands over the other mothers' eyes till they got them up to the pumpkin-glory; and then there was such a yelling and laughing and chasing and ear-boxing that you never heard anything like it; and all at once the funniest papa hallooed out: 'Where's gramma? Gramma's got to see it! Grandma'll enjoy it. It's just gramma's kind of joke,' and then the mothers all got round him and said he shouldn't fool the grandmother, anyway; and he said he wasn't going to: he was just going to bring her out and let her see it; and his wife went along with him to watch that he didn't begin acting up.

"The grandmother had been sitting all alone in her room ever since dinner; because she was always afraid somehow that if you enjoyed yourself it was a sign you were going to suffer for it, and she had enjoyed herself a good deal that day, and she was feeling awfully about it. When the funniest papa and his wife came in she said, 'What is it?

What is it? Is the world a-burnin' up? Well, you got to wrap up warm, then, or you'll ketch your death o' cold runnin' and then stoppin' to rest with your pores all open!'

"The funniest papa's wife she went up and kissed her, and said, 'No, grandmother, the world's all right,' and then she told her just how it was, and how they wanted her to come out and see the jack-o'-lantern, just to please the children; and she must come, anyway; because it was the funniest jack-o'-lantern there ever was, and then she told how the funniest papa had fooled her, and then how they had got the other papas to fool the other mothers, and they had all had the greatest fun then you ever saw. All the time she kept putting on her things for her, and the grandmother seemed to get quite in the notion, and she laughed a little, and they thought she was going to enjoy it as much as anybody; they really did, because they were all very tender of her, and they wouldn't have scared her for anything, and everybody kept cheering her up and telling her how much they knew she would like it, till they got her to the pump. The little pumpkin-glory was feeling awfully proud and self-satisfied; for it had never seen any flower or any vegetable treated with half so much honor by human beings. It wasn't sure at first that it was very nice to be laughed at so much, but after a while it began to conclude that the papas and the mammas were just laughing at the joke of the whole thing. When the old grandmother got up close, it thought it would do something extra to please her; or else the heat of the candle had dried it up so that it cracked without intending to.

Anyway, it tried to give a very broad grin, and all of a sudden it split its mouth from ear to ear."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'MY SAKES! IT'S COMIN' TO LIFE!'"]

"You didn't say it had any ears before," said the boy.

"No; it had them behind," said the papa; and the boy felt like giving him just one pound; but he thought it might stop the story, and so he let the papa go on.

"As soon as the grandmother saw it open its mouth that way she just gave one scream, 'My sakes! It's comin' to life!' And she threw up her arms, and she threw up her feet, and if the funniest papa hadn't been there to catch her, and if there hadn't been forty or fifty other sons and daughters, and grandsons and daughters, and great-grandsons and great-granddaughters, very likely she might have fallen. As it was, they piled round her, and kept her up; but there were so many of them they jostled the pump, and the first thing the pumpkin-glory knew, it fell down and burst open; and the pig that the boys had plagued, and that had kept squealing all the time because it thought that the people had come out to feed it, knocked the loose board off its pen, and flew out and gobbled the pumpkin-glory up, candle and all, and that was the end of the proud little pumpkin-glory."

"And when the pig ate the candle it looked like the magician when he puts burning tow in his mouth," said the boy.

"Exactly," said the papa.

The children were both silent for a moment. Then the boy said, "This story never had any moral, I believe, papa?"

"Not a bit," said the papa. "Unless," he added, "the moral was that you had better not be ambitious, unless you want to come to the sad end of this proud little pumpkin-glory."

"Why, but the good little pumpkin was eaten up, too," said the boy.

"That's true," the papa acknowledged.

"Well," said the little girl, "there's a great deal of difference between being eaten by persons and eaten by pigs."

"All the difference in the world," said the papa; and he laughed, and ran out of the library before the boy could get at him.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

b.u.t.terflyflutterby and Flutterbyb.u.t.terfly

[Ill.u.s.tration]

One morning when the papa was on a visit to the grandfather, the nephew and the niece came rus.h.i.+ng into his room and got into bed with him. He pretended to be asleep, and even when they grabbed hold of him and shook him, he just let his teeth clatter, and made no sign of waking up. But they knew he was fooling, and they kept shaking him till he opened his eyes and looked round, and said, "Oh, oh! where am I?" as if he were all bewildered.

"You're in bed with _us_!" they shouted; and they acted as if they were afraid he would try to get away from them by the way they held on to his arms.

But he lay quite still, and he only said, "I should say _you_ were in bed with _me_. It seems to be my bed."

"It's the same thing!" said the nephew.

"How do you make that out?" asked the papa. "It's the same thing if it's enchantment. But if it isn't, it isn't."

The niece said, "What enchantment?" for she thought that would be a pretty good chance to get what they had come for.

She was perfectly delighted, and gave a joyful thrill all over when the papa said, "Oh, that's a long story."

"Well, the longer the better, _I_ should say; shouldn't you, brother?"

she returned.

The nephew hemmed twice in his throat, and asked, drowsily, "Is it a little-pig story, or a fairy-prince story?" for he had heard from his cousins that their papa would tell you a little-pig story if he got the chance; and you had to look out and ask him which it was going to be beforehand.

"Well, I can't tell," said the papa. "It's a fairy-prince story to begin with, but it may turn out a little-pig story before it gets to the end.

It depends upon how the Prince behaves. But _I'm_ not anxious to tell it," and the papa put his face into the pillow and pretended to fall instantly asleep again.

"Now, brother, you see!" said the niece. "Being so particular!"

"Well, sister," said the nephew, "it wasn't my fault. I _had_ to ask him. You know what they said."

"Well, I suppose we've got to wake him up all over again," said the niece, with a little sigh; and they began to pull at the papa this way and that, but they could not budge him. As soon as they stopped, he opened his eyes.