A Christmas Treasury by Various Authors & Barnes & Noble

Author:Various Authors & Barnes & Noble
Language: eng
Format: epub

II

“It’s never ‘good’ of me to come to talk with you, Letty!” And the minister’s wife sank into a comfortable seat and took off her rigolette. “Enough virtue has gone out of me to-day to Christianize an entire heathen nation! Oh! how I wish Luther would go and preach to a tribe of cannibals somewhere, and make me superintendent of the Sabbath-School! How I should like to deal, just for a change, with some simple problem like the undesirability and indigestibility involved in devouring your next-door neighbor! Now I pass my life in saying, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’; which is far more difficult than to say, ‘Don’t eat your neighbor, it’s such a disgusting habit,—and wrong besides,’—though I dare say they do it half the time because the market is bad. The first thing I’d do would be to get my cannibals to raise sheep. If they ate more mutton, they wouldn’t eat so many missionaries.”

Letty laughed. “You’re so funny, Reba dear, and I was so sad before you came in. Don’t let the minister take you to the cannibals until after I die!”

“No danger!—Letty, do you remember I told you I’d been trying my hand on some verses for a Christmas card?”

“Yes; have you sent them anywhere?”

“Not yet. I couldn’t think of the right decoration and color scheme and was afraid to trust it all to the publishers. Now I’ve found just what I need for one of them, and you gave it to me, Letty!”

“I?”

“Yes, you; to-night, as I came down the road. The house looked so quaint, backed by the dark cedars, and the moon and the snow made everything dazzling. I could see the firelight through the open window, the Hessian soldier andirons, your mother’s portrait, the children asleep in the next room, and you, wrapped in your cape waiting or watching for something or somebody.”

“I wasn’t watching or waiting! I was dreaming,” said Letty hurriedly.

“You looked as if you were watching, anyway, and I thought if I were painting the picture I would call it ‘Expectancy,’ or ‘The Vigil,’ or ‘Sentry Duty.’ However, when I make you into a card, Letty, nobody will know what the figure at the window means, till they read my verses.”

“I’ll give you the house, the room, the andirons, and even mother’s portrait, but you don’t mean that you want to put me on the card?” And Letty turned like a startled deer as she rose and brushed a spark from the hearth-rug.

“No, not the whole of you, of course, though I’m not clever enough to get a likeness even if I wished. I merely want to make a color sketch of your red-brown cape, your hair that matches it, your ear, an inch of cheek, and the eyelashes of one eye, if you please, ma’am.”

“That doesn’t sound quite so terrifying.” And Letty looked more manageable.

“Nobody’ll ever know that a real person sat at a real window and that I saw her there; but when I send the card

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