Paste Jewels

“My dear,” said Thaddeus, one night, as he and Mrs. Perkins entered the library after dinner, “that was a very good dinner to-night.  Don’t you think so?”

“All except the salmon,” said Bessie, with a smile.

“Salmon?” echoed Thaddeus.  “Salmon?  I did not see any salmon.”

“No,” said Bessie, “that was just the trouble.  It didn’t come up, although it was in the house before dinner, I’m certain.  I saw it arrive.”

“Ellen couldn’t have known you intended it for dinner,” said Thaddeus.

“Yes, she knew it was for dinner,” returned Bessie, “but she made a mistake as to whose dinner it was for.  She supposed it was bought for the kitchen-table, and when I went down-stairs to inquire about it a few minutes ago it was fulfilling its assumed mission nobly.  There wasn’t much left but the tail and one fin.”

“Well!” ejaculated Thaddeus, “I call that a pretty cool proceeding.  Did you give her a talking to?”

“No,” Bessie replied, shortly; “I despise a domestic fuss, so I pretended I’d gone down to talk about breakfast.  We’ll have breakfast an hour or two earlier to-morrow, dear.”

“What’s that for?” queried Thaddeus, his eyes open wide with astonishment.  “You are not going shopping, are you?”

“No, Teddy, I’m not; but when I got down-stairs and realized that Ellen had made the natural mistake of supposing the fish was for the down-stairs dinner, this being Friday, I had to think of something to say, and nothing would come except that we wanted breakfast at seven instead of at eight.  It doesn’t do to have servants suspect you of spying upon them, nor is it wise ever to appear flustered—so mamma says—in their presence.  I avoided both by making Ellen believe I’d come down to order an early breakfast.”

“You are a great Bessie,” said Thaddeus, with a laugh.  “I admire you more than ever, my dear, and to prove it I’d get up to breakfast if you’d ordered it at 1 A.M.”

“You’d be more likely to stay up to it,” said Bessie, “and then go to bed after it.”

“There’s your Napoleonic mind again,” said Thaddeus.  “I should never have thought of that way out of it.  But, Bess,” he continued, “when I was praising to-night’s dinner I had a special object in view.  I think Ellen cooks well enough now to warrant us in giving a dinner, don’t you?”

“Well, it all depends on what we have for dinner,” said Bessie.  “Ellen’s biscuits are atrocious, I think, and you know how lumpy the oatmeal always is.”

“Suppose we try giving a dinner with the oatmeal and biscuit courses left out?” suggested Thaddeus, with a grin.

Bessie’s eyes twinkled.  “You make very bright after-dinner speeches, Teddy,” she said.  “I don’t see why we can’t have a dinner with nothing but pretty china, your sparkling conversation, and a few flowers strewn about.  It would be particularly satisfactory to me.”

“They’re not all angels like you, my dear,” Thaddeus returned.  “There’s Bradley, for instance.  He’d die of starvation before we got to the second course in a dinner of that kind, and if there is any one thing that can cast a gloom over a dinner, it is to have one of the guests die of starvation right in the middle of it.”

“Mr. Bradley would never do so ungentlemanly a thing,” said Bessie, laughing heartily.  “He is too considerate a man for that; he’d starve in silence and without ostentation.”

“Why this sudden access of confidence in Bradley?” queried Thaddeus.  “I thought you didn’t like him?”

“Neither I did, until that Sunday he spent with us,” Bessie answered.  “I’ve admired him intensely ever since.  Don’t you remember, we had lemon pie for dinner—one I made myself?”

“Yes, I remember,” said Thaddeus; “but I fail to see the connection between lemon pie and Bradley.  Bradley is not sour or crusty.”

“You wouldn’t have failed to see if you’d watched Mr. Bradley at dinner,” retorted Bessie.  “He ate two pieces of it.”

“And just because a man eats two pieces of lemon pie prepared by your own fair hands you whirl about, and, from utterly disliking him, call him, upon the whole, one of the most admirable products of the human race?” said Thaddeus.

“Not at all,” Bessie replied, with a broad smile; “but I did admire the spirit and politeness of the man.  On our way home from church in the morning we were talking about the good times children have on their little picnics, and Mr. Bradley said he never enjoyed a picnic in his life, because every one he had ever gone to was ruined by the baleful influence of lemon pie.”

Thaddeus laughed.  “Then he didn’t like lemon pie?” he asked.

“No, he hated it,” said Bessie, joining in the laugh.  “He added that the original receipt for it came out of Pandora’s box.”

“Poor Bradley!” cried Thaddeus, throwing his head back in a paroxysm of mirth.  “Hated pie—declared his feelings—and then to be confronted by it at dinner.”

“He behaved nobly,” said Bessie.  “Ate his first piece like a man, and then called for a second, like a hero, when you remarked that it was of my make.”

“You ought to have told him it wasn’t necessary, Bess,” said Thaddeus.

“I felt that way myself at first,” Bessie explained; “but then I thought I wouldn’t let him know I remembered what he had said.”

“I fancy that was better,” said Thaddeus.  “But about that dinner.  What do you say to our inviting the Bradleys, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, the Robinsons, and the Twinings?”

“How many does that make?  Eight besides ourselves?” asked Bessie, counting upon her fingers.

“Yes—ten altogether,” said Thaddeus.

“It can’t be done, dear,” said Bessie.  “We have only eight fruit plates.”

“Can’t you and I go without fruit?” Thaddeus asked.

“Not very well,” laughed Bessie.  “It would never do.”

“They might think the fruit was poisoned if we did, eh?” suggested Thaddeus.

“Besides, Mary never could serve dinner for ten; eight is her number.  Last time we had ten people, don’t you remember, she dropped a tray full of dishes, and poured the claret into the champagne glasses?”

“Oh, yes, so she did,” said Thaddeus.  “That’s how we came to have only eight fruit plates.  I remember.  I don’t think it was the number of people at the table, though.  It was Twining caused the trouble, he had just made the pleasant remark that he wouldn’t have an Irish servant in his house, when Mary fired the salute.”

“Then that settles it,” said Bessie.  “We’ll cut the Twinings out, and ask the others.  I don’t care much for Mrs. Twining, anyhow; she’s nothing but clothes and fidgets.”

“And Twining doesn’t do much but ask you what you think of certain things, and then tell you you are all wrong when he finds out,” said Thaddeus.  “Yes, it’s just as well to cut them off this time.  We’ll make it for eight, and have it a week from Thursday night.”

“That’s Mary’s night off,” said Bessie.

“Then how about having it Friday?”

“That’s Maggie’s night off, and there won’t be anybody to mind the baby.”

“Humph!” said Thaddeus.  “I wish there were a baby safe-deposit company somewhere.  Can’t your mother come over and look after him?”

“No,” said Bessie, “she can’t.  The child always develops something every time mother comes.  Not, of course, that I believe she gives it to him, but she looks for things, don’t you know.”

“Yes,” said Thaddeus, “I know.  Then make it Wednesday.  That’s my busy day down-town, and I shan’t be able to get home much before half-past six, but if dinner is at seven, there will be time enough for me to dress.”

“Very well,” said Bessie.  “I will write the invitations to-morrow, and, meanwhile, you and I can get up the menu.”

“Oysters to begin with, of course,” said Thaddeus.

“I suppose so,” said Bessie, “though, you remember, the last time we had oysters you had to open them, because the man from the market didn’t get here until half-past seven.”

“And Ellen had never opened any except with a tack-hammer,” said Thaddeus.  “Yes, I remember.  But lightning never strikes twice in the same place.  Put down the oysters.  Then we’ll have some kind of a purée—celery purée, eh?”

“That will be very good if Ellen can be induced to keep it thick.”

“Perhaps we’d better tell her we want a celery consommé,” suggested Thaddeus.  “Then it will be sure to be as thick as a dictionary.”

“I guess it will be all right,” said Bessie.  “What kind of fish?”

“Bradley likes salmon; Robinson likes sole; Phillips likes whitebait, and so do I.”

“We’ll have whitebait,” said Bessie, simply.  “Then a saddle of mutton?”

“Yes, and an entrée of some kind, and next individual ruddy ducks.”

“No Roman punch?”

“We can get along without that, I think,” said Thaddeus.  “We want to keep this dinner down to Mary’s comprehension, and I’m afraid she wouldn’t know what to make of an ice in the middle of the dinner.  The chances are she’d want to serve it hot.”

“All right, Teddy.  What next?”

“I would suggest a lemon pie for Bradley,” smiled Thaddeus.

“What do you say to Ellen’s making one of her tipsy-cakes?” suggested Bessie.

“Just the thing,” said Thaddeus, smacking his lips with enthusiasm.  “I could eat a million of ’em.  Then we can finish up with coffee and fruit.”

So it was settled.  The invitations were sent out, and Bessie devoted her energies for the next ten days to making ready.

Ellen’s culinary powers were tested at every meal.  For dinner one night she was requested to prepare the purée, which turned out to be eminently satisfactory.  Thaddeus gave her a few practical lessons in the art of opening oysters, an art of which he had become a master in his college days—in fact, if his own words were to be believed, it was the sole accomplishment he had there acquired which gave any significance whatever to his degree of B. A.—so that in case the “fish gentleman” failed to appear in time nothing disastrous might result.  Other things on the menu were also ordered at various times, and all went so well that when Thaddeus left home on the chosen Wednesday morning, it was with a serene sense of good times ahead.  The invited guests had accepted, and everything was promising.

As Thaddeus had said, Wednesday was his busy day, and never had it been busier than upon this occasion.  Everything moved smoothly, but there was a great deal to move, and finally, when all was done, and Thaddeus rose to leave his desk, it was nearly six o’clock, and quite impossible for him to reach home before seven.  “I shall be late,” he said, as he hurried off; and he was right.  He arrived at home coincidently with his guests, rushed to his room, and dressed.  But one glimpse had he of Bessie, and that was as they passed on the stairs, she hurrying down to receive her guests, he hurrying up to change his clothes.

“Oh, Thad!” was all she said, but to Thaddeus it was disconcerting.

“What is the matter, dear?” he asked.

“Nothing; I’ll tell you later.  Hurry,” she gasped, “or the dinner will be spoiled.”

Thaddeus hurried as he never hurried before, and in fifteen minutes walked, immaculate as to attire, into the drawing-room, where Bessie, her color heightened to an unusual degree, and her usually bright eyes fairly flaming with an unwonted brilliance, was entertaining the Bradleys, the Phillipses, and the Robinsons.

“Didn’t expect me, did you?” said Thaddeus, as he entered the room.

“No,” said Bradley, dryly.  “This is an unexpected pleasure.  I didn’t even know you were a friend of the family.”

“Well, I am,” said Thaddeus.  “One of the oldest friends I’ve got, in fact, which is my sole excuse for keeping you waiting.  Old friends are privileged—eh, Mrs. Robinson?”

“Dinner is served,” came a deep bass voice from the middle of the doorway.

Thaddeus jumped as if he had seen a ghost, and, turning to see what could have caused the strange metamorphosis in the soprano tremolo of Mary’s voice, was astonished to observe in the parting of the portières not the more or less portly Mary, but a huge, burly, English-looking man, bowing in a most effective and graceful fashion to Mrs. Bradley, and then straightening himself up into a pose as rigid and uncompromising as that of a marble statue.

“What on earth—” began Thaddeus, with a startled look of inquiry at Bessie.  But she only shook her head, and put her finger to her lips, enjoining silence, which Thaddeus, fortunately, had the good sense to understand, even if his mind was not equal to the fathoming of that other mystery, the pompous and totally unexpected butler.

But if Thaddeus was surprised to see the butler, he was amazed at the dinner which the butler served.  Surely, he thought, if Ellen can prepare a dinner like this, she ought to be above taking sixteen dollars and a home a month.  It was simply a regal repast.  The oysters were delicious, and the purée was superior to anything Thaddeus had ever eaten in the line of soups in his life—only it was lobster purée, and ten times better than Ellen’s general run of celery purée.  He winked his eye to denote his extreme satisfaction to Bessie when he thought no one was looking, but was overwhelmed with mortification when he observed that the wink had been seen by the overpowering butler, who looked sternly at him, as much as to say, “’Ow wery wulgar!”

“I must congratulate your cook upon her lobster purée, Mrs. Perkins,” said Mr. Phillips.  “It is delicious.”

“Yes,” put in Thaddeus.  “But you ought to taste her celery purée.  She is undoubtedly great on purées.”

Bessie coughed slightly and shook her head at Thaddeus, and Thaddeus thought he detected the germ of a smile upon the cold face of the butler.  He was not sure about it, but it curdled his blood just a little, because that ghost of a smile seemed to have just a tinge of a sneer in it.

“This isn’t the same cook you had last time, is it?” asked Bradley.

“Yes,” said Thaddeus.  “Same one, though it was my wife who made that lem—”

“Thaddeus,” interrupted Bessie, “Mrs. Robinson tells me that she and Mr. Robinson are going down to New York to the theatre on Friday night.  Can’t we all go?”

“Certainly,” said Thaddeus.  “I’m in on any little diversion of that sort.  Why, what’s this?—er—why, yes, of course.  Phillips, you’ll go; and you, too, eh, Bradley?”

Thaddeus was evidently much upset again; for, instead of the whitebait he and Bessie had decided upon for their fish course, the butler had entered, bearing in a toplofty fashion a huge silver platter, upon which lay a superb salmon, beautifully cooked and garnished.  This he was now holding before Thaddeus, and stood awaiting his nod of approval before serving it.  Inasmuch as Thaddeus not only expected whitebait, but had also never before seen the silver platter, it is hardly surprising that he should sit staring at the fish in a puzzled sort of way.  He recovered shortly, however, gave the nod the butler was waiting for, and the dinner proceeded.  And what a dinner it was!  Each new course in turn amazed Thaddeus far more than the course that had preceded it; and now, when the butler, whom Thaddeus had got more or less used to, came in bearing a bottle of wine, followed by another stolid, well-dressed person, who might have been his twin-brother and who was in reality no more than assistant to the other, Thaddeus began to fear that the wine he had partaken of had brought about that duplication of sight which is said to be one of the symptoms of over-indulgence.  Either that or he was dreaming, he thought; and the alternative was not a pleasant one, for Thaddeus did not over-indulge, and as a person of intellect he did not deem it the proper thing to dream at the dinner-table, since the first requisite of dreaming is falling asleep.  This Thaddeus never did in polite society.

To say that he could scarcely contain himself for curiosity to know what had occurred to bring about this singular condition of affairs is to put it with a mildness which justice to Thaddeus compels me to term criminal.  Yet, to his credit be it said, that through the whole of the repast, which lasted for two hours, he kept silent, and but for a slight nervousness of manner no one would have suspected that he was not as he had always been.  Indeed, to none of the party, not even excepting his wife, did Thaddeus appear to be anything but what he should be.  But when, finally, the ladies had withdrawn and the men remained over the coffee and cigars, he was compelled to undergo a still severer test upon his loyalty to Bessie, whose signal to him to accept all and say nothing he was so nobly obeying.

Bradley began it.  “I didn’t know you’d changed from women to men servants, Perkins?”

“Yes,” said Thaddeus “we’ve changed.”

“Rather good change, don’t you think?”

“Splendid,” said Phillips.  “That fellow served the dinner like a prince.”

“I don’t believe he’s any more than a duke, though,” said Bradley.  “His manner was quite ducal—in fact, too ducal, if Perkins will let me criticise.  He made me feel like a poor, miserable, red-blooded son of the people.  I wanted an olive, and, by Jove, I didn’t dare ask for it.”

“That wasn’t his fault,” said Robinson, with a laugh.  “You forget that you live in a country where red blood is as good as blue.  Where did you get him, Thaddeus?”

Thaddeus looked like a rat in a corner with a row of cats to the fore.

“Oh!—we—er—we got him from—dear me!  I never can remember.  Mrs. Perkins can tell you, though,” he stammered.  “She looks after the menagerie.”

“What’s his name?” asked Phillips.

Thaddeus’s mind was a blank.  He could not for the life of him think what name a butler would be likely to have, but in a moment he summoned up nerve enough to speak.

“Grimmins,” he said, desperately.

“Sounds like a Dickens’ character,” said Robinson.  “Does he cost you very much, Thad?”

“Oh no—not so very much,” said Thaddeus, whose case was now so desperate that he resolved to put a stop to it all.  Unfortunately, his method of doing so was not by telling the truth, but by a flight of fancy in which he felt he owed it to Bessie to indulge.

“No—he doesn’t cost much,” he repeated, boldly.  “Fact is, he is a man we’ve known for a great many years.  He—er—he used to be butler in my grandfather’s house in Philadelphia, and—er—and I was there a great deal of the time as a boy, and Grimmins and I were great friends.  When my grandfather died Grimmins disappeared, and until last month I never heard a word of him, and then he wrote to me stating that he was out of work and poor as a fifty-cent table-d’hôte dinner, and would like employment at nominal wages if he could get a home with it.  We were just getting rid of our waitress, and so I offered Grimmins thirty a month, board, lodging, and clothes.  He came on; I gave him one of my old dress-suits, set him to work, and there you are.”

“I thought you said a minute ago Mrs. Perkins got him?” said Bradley, who is one of those disagreeable men with a memory.

“I thought you were talking about the cook,” said Thaddeus, uneasily.  “Weren’t you talking about the cook?”

“No; but we ought to have been,” said Phillips, with enthusiasm.  “She’s the queen of cooks.  What do you pay her?”

“Sixteen,” said Thaddeus, glad to get back on the solid ground of truth once more.

“What?” cried Phillips.  “Sixteen, and can cook like that?  Take me down and introduce me, will you, Perkins?  I’d like to offer her seventeen to come and cook for me.”

“Let’s join the ladies,” said Thaddeus, abruptly.  “There’s no use of our wasting our sweetness upon each other.”

If the head of the house had expected to be relieved from his unfortunate embarrassments by joining the ladies, he was doomed to bitter disappointment, for the conversation abandoned at the table was resumed in the drawing-room.  The dinner had been too much of a success to be forgotten readily.

Thaddeus’s troubles were set going again when he overheard Phillips saying to Bessie, “Thaddeus has been telling us the remarkable story of Grimmins.”

Nor were his woes lightened any when he caught Bessie’s reply: “Indeed?  What story is that?”

“Why, the story of the butler—Grimmins, you know.  How you came to get him, and all that,” said Phillips.  “Really, you are to be congratulated.”

“I am glad to know you feel that way,” said Bessie, simply, with a glance at Thaddeus which was full of wonderment.

“He is a treasure,” said Bradley; “but your cook is a whole chestful of treasures.  And how fortunate you and Thaddeus are!  The idea of there being anywhere in the world a person of such ability in her vocation, and so poor a notion of her worth!”

Thaddeus breathed again, now that the cook was under discussion.  He knew all about her.

“Yes, indeed,” said Bessie.  “He did well.”

“I mean the cook,” returned Bradley.  “You mean she did well, don’t you?”

What Bessie would have answered, or what Thaddeus would have done next if the conversation had been continued, can be a matter of unprofitable speculation only, for at this point a wail from above-stairs showed that Master Perkins had awakened, and the ladies, considerate of Bessie’s maternal feelings, promptly rose to take their leave, and in ten minutes she and Thaddeus were alone.

“What on earth is the story of Grimmins, Thaddeus?” she asked, as the door closed upon the departing guests.

Thaddeus threw himself wearily down upon the sofa and explained.  He told her all he had said about the butler and the cook.

“That’s the story of Grimmins,” he said, when he had finished.

“Oh, dear me, dear me!” cried Bessie, “you told the men that, and I—I, Thaddeus, told the women the truth.  Why, it’s—it’s awful.  You’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Well, now that they know the truth, Bess,” Thaddeus said, “suppose you let me into the secret.  What on earth is the meaning of all this—two butlers, silver platters, dinner fit for the gods, and all?”

“It’s all because of the tipsy-cake,” said Bessie.

“The what?” asked Thaddeus, sitting up and gazing at his wife as if he questioned her sanity.

“The tipsy-cake,” she repeated.  “I gave Ellen the bottle of brandy you gave me for the tipsy-cake, and—and she drank half of it.”

“And the other half?”

“Mary drank that.  They got word this morning that their brother was very ill, and it upset them so I don’t believe they knew what they were doing; but at one o’clock, when I went down to lunch, there was no lunch ready, and when I descended into the kitchen to find out why, I found that the fire had gone out, and both girls were—both girls were asleep on the cellar floor.  They’re there yet—locked in; and all through dinner I was afraid they might come to, and—make a rumpus.”

“And the dinner?” said Thaddeus, a light breaking through into his troubled mind.

“I telegraphed to New York to Partinelli at once, telling him to serve a dinner for eight here to-night, supplying service, cook, dinner, and everything, and at four o’clock these men arrived and took possession.  It was the only thing I could do, Thad, wasn’t it?”

“It was, Bess,” said Thaddeus, gravely.  “It was great; but—by Jove, I wish I’d known, because—Did you really tell the ladies the truth about it?”

“Yes, I did,” said Bessie.  “They were so full of praises for everything that I didn’t think it was fair for me to take all the credit of it, so I told them the whole thing.”

“That was right, too,” said Thaddeus; “but those fellows will never let me hear the end of that infernal Grimmins story.  I almost wish we—”

“You wish what, Teddy dear?”

“I almost wish we had not attempted the tipsy-cake, and had stuck to my original suggestion,” said Thaddeus.

“What was that?” Bessie asked.

“To have lemon pie for dessert, for Bradley’s sake,” answered Thaddeus, as he locked the front door and turned off the gas.

It was early in the autumn.  Mr. and Mrs. Perkins, with their two hopefuls, had returned from a month of rest at the mountains, and the question of school for Thaddeus junior came up.

“He is nearly six years old,” said Bessie, “and I think he is quite intelligent enough to go to school, don’t you?”

“Well, if you want my honest opinion,” Thaddeus answered, “I think he’s intelligent enough to go without school for another year at least.  I don’t want a hot-house boy, and I have always been opposed to forcing these little minds that we are called upon by circumstances to direct.  It seems to me that the thing for us to do is to hold them back, if anything.  If Teddy goes to school now, he’ll be ready for college when he is twelve.  He’ll be graduated at sixteen, and at twenty he’ll be practising law.  At twenty-five he’ll be leader of the bar; and then—what will there be left for him to achieve at fifty?  Absolutely nothing.”

Mrs. Perkins laughed.  “You have great hopes for Teddy, haven’t you?”

“Certainly I have,” Thaddeus replied; “and why shouldn’t I?  Doesn’t he combine all my good qualities plus yours?  How can he be anything else than great?”

“I am afraid there’s a touch of vanity in you,” said Mrs. Perkins, with a smile.  “That remark certainly indicates it.”

“No—it’s not vanity in me,” said Thaddeus.  “It’s confidence in you.  You’ve assured me so often of my perfection that I am beginning to believe in it; and as for your perfection, I’ve always believed in it.  Hence, when I see Teddy combining your perfect qualities with my own, I regard him as a supernaturally promising person—that is, I do until he begins to show the influence of contact with the hired man, and uses language which he never got from you or from me.”

“Granting that he is great at twenty-five,” said Mrs. Perkins, after a few moments’ reflection, “is that such a horrible thing?”

“It isn’t for the parents of the successful youth, but for the successful youth himself it’s something awful,” returned Thaddeus, with a convincing shake of the head.  “If no one ever lived beyond the age of thirty-five it wouldn’t be so bad, but think of living to be even so young as sixty, with a big reputation to sustain through more than half of that period!  I wouldn’t want to have to sustain a big name for twenty-five years.  Success entails conspicuousness, and conspicuousness makes error almost a crime.  Put your mind on it for a moment.  Think of Teddy here.  How nervous it would make him in everything he undertook to feel that the eyes of the world were upon him.  And take into consideration that other peculiarity of human nature which leads us all, you and me as well as every one else, to believe that the man who does not progress is going backward, that there is no such thing as standing still; then think of a man illustrious enough for seventy at twenty-five—at the limit of success, with all those years before him, and no progress possible!  No, my dear.  Don’t let’s talk of school for Teddy yet.”

“I am sure I don’t want to force him,” said Mrs. Perkins, “but it sometimes seems to me that he needs lessons in discipline.  I can’t be following around after him all the time, and it seems to me some days that I do nothing but find fault with him.  I don’t want him to think I’m a stern mother; and when he tells me, as he did yesterday, that he wishes I’d take a vacation for a month, I can’t blame him.”

“Did he tell you that?” asked Thaddeus, with a chuckle.

“Yes, he did,” replied Mrs. Perkins.  “I’d kept him in a chair for an hour because he would tease Tommy, and when finally I let him go I told him that he was wearing me out with his naughtiness.  About an hour later he came back and said, ‘You have an awful hard time bringin’ me up, don’t you?’  I said yes, and added that he might spare me the necessity of scolding him so often, to which he replied that he’d try, but thought it would be better if I’d take a vacation for a month.  He hadn’t much hope for his own improvement.”

Thaddeus shook internally.

“He’s perfectly wild, too, at times,” Mrs. Perkins continued.  “He wants to do such fearful things.  I caught him sliding down the banisters yesterday head-foremost, and you know how he was at the Mountain House all summer long.  Perfectly irrepressible.”

“That’s very true,” said Thaddeus.  “I was speaking of it to the doctor up there, and asked him what he thought I’d better do.”

“And what did he say?” asked Mrs. Perkins.

“He stated his firm belief that there was nothing you or I could do to get him down to a basis, but thought Hagenbeck might accomplish something.”

“No doubt he thought that,” cried Bessie.  “No doubt everybody thought that, but it wasn’t entirely Teddy’s fault.  If there is anything in the world that is well calculated to demoralize an active-minded, able-bodied child, it is hotel life.  Teddy was egged on to all sorts of indiscretions by everybody in the hotel, from the bell-boys up.  If he’d stand on his head on the cashier’s desk, the cashier would laugh first, and then, to get rid of him, would suggest that he go into the dining-room and play with the headwaiter; and when he upset the contents of his bait-box in Mrs. Harkaway’s lap, she interfered when I scolded him, and said she liked it.  What can you do when people talk that way?”

“Get him to upset his bait-box in her lap again,” said Thaddeus.  “I think if he had been encouraged to do that as a regular thing, every morning for a week, she’d have changed her tune.”

“Well, it all goes to prove one thing,” said Mrs. Perkins, “and that is, Teddy needs more care than we can give him personally.  We are too lenient.  Whenever you start in to punish him it ends up with a game; when I do it, and he says something funny, as he always does, I have to laugh.”

“How about the ounce-of-prevention idea?” suggested Thaddeus.  “We’ve let him go without a nurse for a year now—why can’t we employ a maid to look after him—not to boss him, but to keep an eye on him—to advise him, and, in case he declines to accept the advice, to communicate with us at once?  All he needs is directed occupation.  As he is at present, he directs his own occupation, with the result that the things he does are of an impossible sort.”

“That means another servant for me to manage,” sighed Mrs. Perkins.

“True; but a servant is easier to manage than Teddy.  You can discharge a servant if she becomes impossible.  We’ve got Teddy for keeps,” said Thaddeus.

“Very well—so be it,” said Mrs. Perkins.  “You are right, I guess, about school.  He ought not to be forced, and I’d be worried about him all the time he was away, anyhow.”

So it was decided that Teddy should have a nurse, and for a day or two the subject was dropped.  Later on Mrs. Perkins reopened it.

“I’ve been thinking all day about Teddy’s nurse, Thaddeus,” she said, one evening after dinner.  “I think it would be nice if we got him a French nurse.  Then he could learn French without any forcing.”

“Good scheme,” said Thaddeus.  “I approve of that.  We might learn a little French from her ourselves, too.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Bessie and that point was decided.  The new nurse was to be French, and the happy parents drew beatific visions of the ease with which they should some day cope with Parisian hotel-keepers and others in that longed-for period when they should find themselves able, financially, to visit the French capital.

But—

Ah!  Those buts that come into our lives!  Conjunctions they are called!  Are they not rather terminals?  Are they not the forerunners of chaos in the best-laid plans of mankind?  If for every “but” that destroys our plan of action there were ready always some better-succeeding plan, then might their conjunctive force seem more potent; as life goes, however, unhappily, they are not always so provided, and the English “but” takes on its Gallic significance, which leads the Frenchman to define it as meaning “the end.”

There was an object-lesson in store for the Perkinses.

On the Sunday following the discussion with which this story opens, the Perkinses, always hospitable, though distinctly unsociable so far as the returning of visits went, received a visit from their friends the Bradleys.  Ordinarily a visit from one’s town friends is no very great undertaking for a suburban host or hostess, but when the town friends have children from whom they are inseparable, and those children have nurses who, whithersoever the children go, go there also, such a visit takes on proportions the stupendousness of which I, being myself a suburban entertainer, would prefer not to discuss, fearing lest some of my friends with families, recalling these words, might consider my remarks of a personal nature.  Let me be content with saying, therefore, that when the Bradleys, Mr. and Mrs., plus Master and Miss, plus Harriet, the English nurse, came to visit the Perkins homestead that Sunday, it was a momentous occasion for the host and hostess, and, furthermore, like many another momentous occasion, was far-reaching in its results.

In short, it provided the Perkins family with that object-lesson to which I have already alluded.

The Bradleys arrived on Sunday night, and as they came late little Harry Bradley and the still smaller Jennie Bradley were tired, and hence not at all responsive to the welcomes of the Perkinses, large or small.  They were excessively reticent.  When Mrs. Perkins, kneeling before Master Harry, asked him the wholly unnecessary question, “Why, is this Harry?” he refused wholly to reply; nor could the diminutive Jennie be induced to say anything but “Yumps” in response to a similar question put to her, “Yumps” being, it is to be presumed, a juvenilism for “Yes, ma’am.”  Hence it was that the object-lesson did not begin to develop until breakfast on Sunday morning.  The first step in the lesson was taken at that important meal, when Master Harry observed, in stentorian yet sweetly soprano tones:

“Hi wants a glarse o’ milk.”

To which his nurse, standing behind his chair to relieve the Perkinses’ maid of the necessity of looking after the Bradley hopefuls, replied:

“’Ush, ’Arry, ’ush!  Wite till yer arsked.”

Mrs. Bradley nodded approval to Harriet, and observed quietly to Mrs. Perkins that Harriet was such a treasure; she kept the children so well in subjection.

The incident passed without making any impression upon the minds of any but Thaddeus junior, who, taking his cue from Harry, vociferously asserted that he, too, wished a glass of milk, and in such terms as made the assertion tantamount to an ultimatum.

Then Miss Jennie seemed to think it was her turn.

“Hi doan’t care fer stike.  Hi wants chickin,” said she.  “I’n’t there goin’ ter be no kikes?”

Mrs. Perkins laughed, though I strongly suspect that Thaddeus junior would have been sent from the table had he ventured to express a similar sentiment.  Mrs. Bradley blushed; Bradley looked severe; Perkins had that expression which all parents have when other people’s children are involved, and which implies the thought, “If you were mine there’d be trouble; but since you are not mine, how cunning you are!”  But Harriet, the nurse, met the problem.  She said:

“Popper’s goin’ ter have stike, Jinnie; m’yby Mr. Perkins’ll give yer lots o’ gryvy.  Hit i’n’t time fer the kikes.”

Perhaps I ought to say to those who have not studied dialect as “she is spoke” that the word m’yby is the Seven Dials idiom for maybe, itself more or less an Americanism, signifying “perhaps,” while “kikes” is a controvertible term for cakes.

After breakfast, as a matter of course, the senior members of both families attended divine service, then came dinner, and after dinner the usual matching of the children began.  The hopefuls of Perkins were matched against the scions of Bradley.  All four were brought down-stairs and into the parental presence in the library.

“Your Harry is a fine fellow, Mrs. Bradley,” said Thaddeus.

“Yes, we think Harry is a very nice boy,” returned Mrs. Bradley, with a fond glance at the youth.

“Wot djer si about me, mar?” asked Harry.

“Nothing, dear,” replied Mrs. Bradley, raising her eyebrows reprovingly.

“Yes, yer did, too,” retorted Harry.  “Yer said as ’ow hi were a good boy.”

“Well, ’e i’n’t, then,” interjected Jennie.  “’E’s a bloomin’ mean un.  ’E took a knoife an’ cut open me doll.”

“’Ush, Jinnie, ’ush!” put in the nurse.  “Don’t yer tell tiles on ’Arry.  ’E didn’t mean ter ’urt yer doll.  ’Twas a haxident.”

“No, ’twasn’t a haxident,” said Jennie.  “’E done it a-purpice.”

“Well, wot if hi did?” retorted Harry.  “Didn’t yer pull the tile off me rockin’-’orse?”

“Well, never mind,” said Bradley, seeing how strained things were getting.  “Don’t quarrel about it now.  It’s all done and gone, and I dare say you were both a little to blame.”

“’Hi war’n’t!” said Harry, and then the subject was dropped.  The children romped in and out through the library and halls for some time, and the Bradleys and Perkinses compared notes on various points of interest to both.  After a while they again reverted to the subject of their children.

“Does Harry go to school?” asked Bessie.

“No, we think he’s too young yet,” returned Mrs. Bradley.  “He learns a little of something every day from Harriet, who is really a very superior girl.  She is a good servant.  She hasn’t been in this country very long, and is English to the core, as you’ve probably noticed, not only in her way of comporting herself, but in her accent.”

“Yes, I’ve observed it,” said Bessie.  “What does she teach him?”

“Oh, she tells him stories that are more or less instructive, and she reads to him.  She’s taught him one or two pretty little songs—ballads, you know—too.  Harry has a sweet little voice.  Harry, dear, won’t you sing that song about Mrs. Henry Hawkins for mamma?”

“Don’t warn’ter,” said Harry.  “Hi’m sick o’ that bloomin’ old song.”

“Seems to me I’ve heard it,” said Thaddeus.  “As I remember it, Harry, it was very pretty.”

“It is,” said Bradley.  “It’s the one you mean—‘Oh, ’Lizer! dear ’Lizer!  Mrs. ’Ennery ’Awkins.’  Harry sings it well, too; but I say, Thad, you ought to hear the nurse sing it.  It’s great.”

“I should think it might be.”

“She has the accent down fine, you know.”

“Sort of born to it, eh?”

“Yes; you can’t cultivate that accent and get it just right.”

“I’ll do ‘Dear Old Dutch’ for yer,” suggested Harry.  “Hi likes thet better ’n ‘Mrs. ’Awkins.’”

So Harry deserted “Mrs. ’Awkins” and sang that other pathetic coster-ballad, “Dear Old Dutch,” and, to the credit of Harriet, the nurse, it must be said that he was marvellously well instructed.  It could not have been done better had the small vocalist been the own son of a London coster-monger instead of the scion of an American family of refinement.

Thus the day passed.  Jennie proved herself quite as proficient in the dialect of Seven Dials as was Harry, or even Harriet, and when she consented to stand on a chair and recite a few nursery rhymes, there was not an unnoticed “h” that she did not, sooner or later, pick up and attach to some other word to which it was not related, as she went along.

In short, as far as their speech was concerned, thanks to association with Harriet, Jennie and Harry were as perfect little cockneys as ever ignored an aspirate.

The visit of the Bradleys, like all other things, came to an end, and Bessie, Thaddeus, and the children were once more left to themselves.  Teddy junior, it was observed, after his day with Harry, developed a slight tendency to misplace the letter “h” in his conversation, but it was soon corrected, and things ran smoothly as of yore.  Only—the Only being the natural sequence of the But referred to some time since—Mr. and Mrs. Perkins changed their minds about the French nurse, and it came about in this way:

“Thaddeus,” said Bessie, after the Bradleys had departed, “what is the tile of a rockin’-’orse?”

“I don’t know.  Why?” asked Thaddeus.

“Why, don’t you remember,” she said, “young Harry Bradley accused Jennie of pulling out the tile of his rockin’-’orse?”

“Oh yes!  Ha, ha!” laughed Thaddeus.  “So she did.  I know now.  Tile is cockney for tail.”

“Did you notice the accent those children had?”

“Yes.”

“All got from the nurse, too?”

“True.”

“Ah, Teddy, what do you think of our getting a French maid, after all?  Don’t you think that we’d run a great risk?”

“Of what?”

“Of having Ted speak—er—cockney French.”

“H’m—yes.  Very likely,” said Thaddeus.  “I’d thought of that myself, and, I guess, perhaps we’d better stick to Irish.”

“So do I.  We can correct any tendency to a brogue, don’t you think?”

“Certainly,” said Thaddeus.  “Or, if we couldn’t, it wouldn’t be fatal to the boy’s prospects.  It might even help him if he—”

“Help him?  If what?”

“If he ever went into polities,” said Perkins.

And that was the object-lesson which a kindly fate gave to the Perkinses in time to prevent their engaging a French maid for the children.

As to its value as a lesson, as to the value of its results, those who are familiar with French as spoken by nurse-instructed youths can best judge.

I am not unduly familiar with that or any other kind of French, but I have ideas in the matter.

That you may thoroughly comprehend how it happened that on last Christmas Day Thaddeus meted out gifts of value so unprecedented to the domestics of what he has come to call his “menagerie”—the term menage having seemed to him totally inadequate to express the state of affairs in his household—I must go back to the beginning of last autumn, and narrate a few of the incidents that took place between that period and the season of Peace on Earth and Good-will to Men.  Should I not do so there would be many, I doubt not, who would deem Thaddeus’s course unjustifiable, especially when we are all agreed that Christmas Day should be for all sorts and conditions of men the gladdest, happiest day of all the year.

Thaddeus and Bessie and the little Thad had returned to their attractive home after an absence of two months in a section of the Adirondacks whither the march of civilization had not carried such comforts as gas, good beds, and other luxuries, to which the little family had become so accustomed that real camp-life, with its beds of balsam, lights of tallow, and “fried coffee,” possessed no charms for them.  They were all renewed in spirit and quite ready to embark once more upon the troubled seas of house-keeping; and, as they saw it on that first night at home, their crew was a most excellent one.  The cook rose almost to the exalted level of a chef in the estimation of Thaddeus as course upon course, to the number of seven, each made up of some delicacy of the season, came to the table and received the indorsement which comes from total consumption.  They were well served, too, these courses; and the two heads of the family, when Mary, the waitress, would enter the butler’s pantry, leaving them alone and unobserved, nodded their satisfaction to each other across the snow-white cloth, and by means of certain well-established signals, such as shaking their own hands and winking the left eye simultaneously, with an almost vicious jerk of the head, silently congratulated themselves upon the prospects of a peaceful future in a domestic sense.

“That was just the best dinner I have had in centuries,” said Thaddeus, as they adjourned to the library after the meal was over.  “The broiled chicken was so good, Bess, that for a moment I wished I were a bachelor again, so that I could have it all; and after I got over my first feeling of hesitation over the oysters, and realized that it was September with an R—belated, it is true, but still there—and ate six of them, I think I could have gone down-stairs and given cook a diamond ring with seven solitaires in it and a receipted bill for a seal-skin sacque.  I don’t see how we ever could have thought of discharging her last June, do you?”

“It was a good dinner,” said Bessie, discreetly ignoring the allusion to their intentions in June; for she had a well-defined recollection that at that time Bridget had given signs of emotional insanity every time she was asked to prepare a five-o’clock breakfast for Thaddeus and his friends, to the number of six, who had acquired the habit of going off on little shooting trips every Saturday, making the home of Thaddeus their headquarters over Sunday, when the game the huntsmen had bagged the day before had to be plucked, cleaned, and cooked by her own hands for dinner.  “And it was nicely selected, too,” she added.  “I sometimes think that I’ll let Bridget do the ordering at the market.”

“H’m!  Well,” said Thaddeus, shaking his head dubiously, “I haven’t a doubt that Bridget could do it, and would be very glad to do it; but I don’t believe in setting a cook up in business.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that I haven’t any doubt that Bridget would in a very short time become a highly successful produce-broker with bull tendencies.  The chicken market would be buoyant, and the quotations on the Stock Exchange of, say, B., S., and P.-U.-C.—otherwise, Beef, Succotash, and Picked-Up-Codfish—would rise to the highest point in years.  Why, my dear, by Christmas-time cook would have our surplus in her own pocket-book; and in the place of the customary five oranges and an apple she would receive from the butcher a Christmas-card in the shape of a check of massive, if not graceful, proportions.  No, Bess, I think the old way is the best.”

“Perhaps it is.  By-the-way, John has kept the grounds looking well, hasn’t he?  The lawn doesn’t seem to have a weed on it,” said Bessie, walking to the window and gazing out at the soft velvety sward in the glow of twilight.

“Yes, it looks pretty well; but there’s a small heap of stuff over there near the fence which rather inclines me to believe that the weeds have been pulled out within the last few days—in fact, since you wrote to announce our return.  John is an energetic man in an emergency, and I haven’t a doubt he has been here at least once a week ever since we left.  I’ll keep a record of John this fall.”

And so the two contented home-comers talked happily along, and when they closed their eyes in sleep that night they were, upon the whole, very well satisfied with life.

Weeks elapsed, and with them some of the air-castles collapsed.  Whether custom staled the infinite variety of the cook’s virtues, and age withered the efficiency of Mary, the waitress, or whether something was really and radically wrong with the girls, Thaddeus and Bessie could not make out.  Certain it was, however, that by slow degrees the satisfaction for which that first dinner seemed to stand as guarantor wore away, and dissatisfaction entered the household.  Mary developed a fondness for church at most inconvenient hours—hours at which in fact, neither Thaddeus nor Bessie had ever supposed church could be.  That it was eternal they both knew, but they had always supposed there were intermissions.  Then the cook’s family, which had hitherto been moderately healthful, began to show signs of invalidism, though no such calamity as actual dissolution ever set its devastating step within the charmed circle of her relatives.  Cousins fell ill whom she alone could comfort; nephews developed maladies for which she alone could care; and, according to Thaddeus’s record, John had been compelled on penalty of a fine to attend the funerals of some twenty-four deceased intimate friends in less than two months, although the newspapers contained no mention of the existence of a possible epidemic in the Celtic quarter.  It is true that John showed a more pronounced desire to make his absence less inconvenient to his employer than did Mary and the cook, by providing a substitute when the Ancient Order of Funereal Hibernians compelled him to desert the post of duty; but Thaddeus declared the “remedy worse than the disease,” for the reason that John’s substitute—his own brother-in-law—was a weaver by trade, whose baskets the public did not appreciate, and whose manner of cutting grass in the early fall and of tending furnace later on was atrocious.

“If I could hire that man in summer,” Thaddeus remarked one night when John’s substitute had “fixed” the furnace so that the library resembled a cold-storage room, “I think we could make this house an arctic paradise.  He seems to have a genius for taking warmth by the neck and shaking enough degrees of heat out of it to turn a conflagration into an iceberg.  I think I’ll tell the Fire Commissioners about him.”

“He can’t compare with John,” was Bessie’s answer to this.

“No.  I think that’s why John sends him here when he is off riding in carriages in honor of his deceased chums.  By the side of Dennis, John is a jewel.”

“John is very faithful with the furnace,” said Bessie.  “He never lets it go down.  Why, day before yesterday I turned off every register in the house, and even then had to open all the windows to keep from suffocating.”

“But that wasn’t all John, my dear,” said Thaddeus.  “The Weather Bureau had something to do with it.  It was a warm day for this season of the year, anyhow.  If John could combine the two businesses of selling coal and feeding furnaces, I think he would become a millionaire.  And, by-the-way, I think you ought to speak to him, Bess, about the windows.  Since you gave him the work of window-cleaning to do, it is evident that he thinks I have nothing to say in the matter, for he persistently ignores my requests that he clean them in squares as they are made, and not rub up a little circle in the middle, so that they look like blocks of opalescent glass with plate-glass bulls’-eyes let into the centre.  Look at them now.”

“Dennis did that.  John had to go to Mount Vernon with his militia company to-day.”

“Dennis is well named, for his name is—But never mind.  I’ll credit John with his twelfth day off in four weeks.”

From John to Bridget, in the matter of days off, was an easy step, though such was Bessie’s consummate diplomacy that Thaddeus would probably have continued in ignorance of the extent to which Bridget absented herself had they not both taken occasion one day to visit some relatives in Philadelphia, and on their return home at night found no dinner awaiting them.

“What’s the matter now?” asked Thaddeus, a little crossly, perhaps, for visiting relatives in Philadelphia irritated him—possibly because he and they did not agree in politics, and their assumption that Thaddeus’s party was entirely made up of the ignorant and self-seeking was galling to him.  “Why isn’t dinner ready?”

“Mary says that an hour after we left cook got a telegram from New York saying that her brother was dying, and she had to go right off.”

“I thought that brother was dying last week?”

“No; that was her mother’s brother, he got well.  This is another person entirely.”

“Naturally,” snapped Thaddeus.  “But next time we get a cook let’s have one whose relatives are all dead, or in the old country, where they can’t be reached.  I’m tired of this business.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be cross with me about it, Thad,” said Bessie, with a teary look in her eyes.  “I have to put up with a great deal more of it than you have, only you never know of it.  Why, I’ve cooked one-half of my own luncheons in the last month.”

“And the dinners, too, I’ll wager,” growled Thaddeus.

“No; she’s always got home for dinner heretofore.”

“Well, we’ll keep a record-book for her, too, then.  And we’ll be generous with her.  We’ll allow her just as I was allowed in college—twenty-five per cent. in cuts.  If she has twenty-five and a fifth per cent. she goes.”

“I don’t think I understand,” said Bessie.

“Well, we’ll put it this way: There are thirty days in a month.  That means ninety meals a month.  If she cooks sixty-seven and a half of them she can stay; if she fails to cook the other twenty-two and a half she can stay; but woe be unto her if she slips up by even so little as a millionth part of the sixty-eighth!”

“I don’t see how you can manage the half part of it.”

“We’ll leave that to her,” said Thaddeus, firmly; “and, what is more, we’ll put John and Mary on the same basis, and Dennis we won’t have on any basis at all.  A man who will take advantage of his brother’s absence at a wake to black the shoes of that brother’s only employer with stove-polish is not the kind of a man I want to have around.”

“It will be a very good plan,” said Bessie, “for all except Mary.  Her absences she cannot well avoid.  She has to go to church.”

“How many times a week does she have to go?” queried Thaddeus.

“She is required to go to confession.”

“Well, let her reform, and then she’ll have nothing to go to confession for.  I don’t believe that’s where she goes, either.  I notice that one-half those evenings she takes off, permitting me to mind the front door, and enabling us both to acquire proficiency in the art of helping ourselves at dinner, there’s a fireman’s ball or a policeman’s hop or a letter-carriers’ theatre party going on somewhere in the county, and it’s my belief the worshipping she does on these occasions is at the shrine of Terpsichore or that of Melpomene, which is a heathen custom and not to be tolerated here.  If she’s so fond of living in church we can quote to her Hamlet’s advice to Ophelia—‘Get thee to a nunnery!’  Why, Bess, I was mortified to death the other night when Bradley dined here, he’s all the time bragging about his menagerie, and I tried to bluff him out and make him believe we were waited on by angels in disguise, and you know what happened.  He came, saw, and I was regularly knocked out.  You let us in; we waited on ourselves; cook had prepared the seven-o’clock dinner at five to give her a chance to go to the hospital to see her brother-in-law with the measles; John had one of his Central-African fires on, and Bradley’s laughing about it yet.”

“Mr. Bradley was very disagreeable the other night, anyhow,” sniffed Bessie.  “He acted as if he were camping out!”

“Well, I can’t honestly say I blame him for that,” retorted Thaddeus.  “It only needed a balsam bed and a hole in the roof to let the rain in on him to complete the illusion.”

Finally, December came, and the tendencies of absenteeism on the part of the servants showed no signs of abatement.  They were remonstrated with, but it made no difference.  They didn’t go out, they declared, because they wanted to, but because they had to.  Cook couldn’t let her relatives go unattended.  Mary’s religious scruples simply dragged her out of the house, try as she would to stay in; and as for John, as long as Dennis was on hand to take his place he couldn’t see why Mr. Perkins was dissatisfied.  To tell the truth, John had recently imbibed some more or less capitalistic—or anticapitalistic—doctrines, and he was quite incapable of understanding why, if a street-contractor, for instance, was permitted by the laws of the land to sublet the work for which he had contracted, he, John, should not be permitted to sublet his contract to Dennis, piecemeal, or even as a whole, if he saw fit to do so.

Thaddeus, seeing that Bessie was very much upset by the condition of affairs, had said little about it since Thanksgiving Day, when he had said about as much as the subject warranted after a six-course dinner had been hurried through in one hour, two courses having been omitted that Bridget might catch the train leaving for New York at 3.10.  Nor would he have said anything further than the final words of dismissal had he not come home late one afternoon to dress for a dinner at his club, when he discovered that, owing to the usual causes, the week’s wash, which the combined efforts of cook and waitress should have finished that day, was delayed twenty-four hours, the consequence being that Thaddeus had to telephone to the haberdashery for a dress-shirt and collar.

“It’s bad enough having one’s wife buy these things for one, but when it comes to having a salesman sell you over a telephone the style of shirt and collar ‘he always wears himself,’ it is maddening,” began Thaddeus, and then he went on at such an outrageous rate that Bessie became hysterical, and Thaddeus’s conscience would not permit of his going out at all that night, and that was the beginning of the end.

“I’ll fix ’em at Christmas-time,” said Thaddeus.

“You won’t forget them at Christmas, I hope, Thad,” said Bessie, whose forgiving nature would not hear of anything so ungenerous as forgetting the servants during the holidays.

“No,” laughed Thaddeus.  “I won’t forget ’em.  I’ll give ’em all the very things they like best.”

“Oh, I see,” smiled Bessie.  “On the coals-of-fire principle.  Well, I shouldn’t wonder but it would work admirably.  Perhaps they’ll be so ashamed they’ll do better.”

“Perhaps—if the coals do not burn too deep,” said Thaddeus, with a significant smile.

Christmas Eve arrived, and little Thad’s tree was dressed, the gifts were arranged beneath it, and all seemed in readiness for the dawning of the festal day, when Bessie, taking a mental inventory of the packages and discovering nothing among them for the servants save her own usual contribution of a dress and a pair of gloves for each, turned and said to Thaddeus:

“Where are the hot coals?”

“The what?” asked Thaddeus.

“The coals of fire for the girls and John.”

“Oh!” Thaddeus replied, “I have ’em in the library.  I don’t think they’ll go well with the tree.”

“What are they?” queried Bess, with a natural show of curiosity.  “Checks?”

“Yes, partly,” said Thaddeus.  “Mary is to have a check for $16, Bridget one for $18, and John one for $40.”

“Why, Thaddeus, that’s extravagant.  Now, my dear, there’s no use of your doing anything of that—”

“Wait and see,” said Thaddeus.

“But, Teddy!” Bessie remonstrated.  “Those are the amounts of their wages.  You will spoil them, and if I—”

“As I said before, wait, Bess, wait!” said Thaddeus, calmly.  “You’ll understand the whole scheme to-morrow, after breakfast.”

And she did, and when she did she almost wished for a moment that she didn’t, for after breakfast Thaddeus summoned the three offenders into his presence, and the effect was not altogether free from painful features to the forgiving Bess.

“Bridget,” Thaddeus said, “do you remember what Mrs. Perkins gave you last Christmas?”

“I do not!” replied Bridget, rather uncompromisingly; for it was a matter of history that she thought Mrs. Perkins on the last Christmas festival had shown signs of parsimony in giving her a calico gown instead of one of silk.

“Well, you won’t forget next year what you got this,” said Thaddeus, dryly.  “Here is an envelope containing $18, the amount of your wages until January 1st.  Mary, what did you get last Christmas?”

“A box of candy, sir.”

“Nothing else?”

“I believe there was a dress of some kind.  I gave it to my cousin.”

“Good.  I am glad you were so generous.  Here is an envelope for you.  It has $16 in it, your wages up to January 1st.”

Bessie stood in the doorway, a mute witness to what seemed to her an incomprehensible scene.

“John, what did you get?”

“Five dollars an’ a day off.”

“And a two-dollar bill for Dennis, eh?”

“Dennis got that.”

“True.  Well, John, here’s $40 for you—that pays you until January 1st.  Now, it strikes me that, considering the behavior of you three people, I am very generous to pay you your wages a week in advance, but I am not going to stop there.  I have studied you all very carefully, and I’ve tried to discover what it is you are fondest of.  Cook and Mary do not seem to care much for dresses, though I believe there are dresses and gloves under the tree for them, which fact they will doubtless forget by next Christmas Day.  The five dollars and a day off John seems to remember, though from his manner of recalling it I do not think his remembrance is a very pleasing one.  Now I’ve found out what it is you all like the best, and I’m going to give it to you.”

Here the trio endeavored to appear gracious, though they were manifestly uneasy and a bit dissatisfied with what John would have called “the luks of t’ings.”

“Cook, from the 1st of January, may go to her relatives, and stay until they’re every one of them restored to health, if it takes forty years.  Mary may consider herself presented with sixty years’ vacation without pay; and for you, John, I have written this letter of recommendation to the proprietors of a large undertaking establishment in New York, who will, I trust, engage you as a chief mourner, or perhaps hearse-driver, for the balance of your days.  At any rate, you, too, after January 1st, may consider yourself free to go to any funeral or militia exercises, or anything else you may choose to honor with your presence, at your own expense.  You are all given leave of absence without pay until further notice.  I wish you a merry Christmas.  Good-morning.”

There were no farewells in the house that day; and inasmuch as there was no Christmas dinner either, Thaddeus and Bessie did not miss the service of the waitress, who, when last seen, was walking airily off towards the station, accompanied by the indignant John and a bundle-laden cook.  Next day their trunks went also.

“It was rather a hard thing to do on Christmas Day, Thaddeus,” said Bessie, a little later.

“Oh no,” quibbled Thaddeus.  “It was very easy under the circumstances, and quite appropriate.  This is the time of peace on earth and good-will to men.  The only way for us to have peace on earth was to get rid of those two women; and as for John, he has my good-will, now that he is no longer in my employ.”