Page:The art of story-telling, with nearly half a hundred stories, y Julia Darrow Cowles .. (IA artofstorytellin00cowl).pdf/253

 his mammy's cabin, buried in thought. It was a very unusual condition for Jerusalem Artie, but then, the occasion was an unusual one. The next day would be Christmas.

Presently he looked up. "Mammy," he questioned, "what's we-all a-gwine hab fo' Chris-mus dinnah?"

"Lan' sakes, chile," his mammy answered, "how-all's I a-gwine know dat? Yo' pappy ain't got nuthin' yit, an' I ain't a-reckonin' he will git nuthin'."

Jerusalem Artie looked down, and was once more lost in thought.

He made a comical little figure there on the door-step, but to this fact both he and his mammy were blissfully oblivious. On his head he wore an old straw hat which his pappy had discarded for a fur cap at the approach of winter weather. In the spring the exchange would be made again, and Jerusalem Artie would wear the fur. But this did not trouble the boy. When it grew too hot, he left off any sort of head covering; and when it grew too cold, he wrapped one of mammy's gay bandanas about his woolly head, and set the battered straw on top of that.