Page:Hallowe'en festivities (1903).djvu/144

140 knife, and that queer place by the knee was the stick o' lick'rish got crosswise. I didn't empty it. Folks will keep sech things, you know, an' it's up in my bedroom now.

Well, Christmas eve come too quick for me that time. So when my boy come in, I begun fust, the fust time since I knowed him.

"Norvyle," I says, " I've had a real nice visit with you, an' I wish I could ask you to stay longer. But it's Christmas Eve, an' people orter be with their folks to-night. You know where your folks is, leastways your father an' elder brother. So I'm dreffle sorry to seem imperlite, but I really think the best thing for you to do—is—to go—home!" I got it out somehow.

Norvyle looked right at me, kind o' mournful, an' 's I live, that boy opened his mouth an' begun to sing. An' oh! what do you s'pose he sung? "Home, sweet home!" He'd never sung before, but his voice was like a wood-robin's, an' when it stopped—why, he stopped. He didn't go, he jest wasn't there.

Well, I've got along somehow. I'm an old woman now. I'm failin' lately pretty fast, an' it makes me think o' goin' home to join pa 'n' ma 'n' the boys. When I says boys, I mean four on 'em, for besides my three, I'm cert'n there's goin' to be another one, a little chap, with rough reddish-yeller hair, an' lots o' freckles. Course, I know it's all diff'rent up there, an' things ain't a speck like what they be here; but somehow it won't seem exackly nat'ral if that little feller don't somewheres in the course o' conva'sation bring in that fav'rit remark o' his'n, "Don't you want to hear me speak my piece?"