While Polly answered: "I was just thinking about it, Adam.
Wasn't it the grandest thing?"
The next Christmas Mrs. Bates advanced to a tree that reached the
ceiling, with many candles, real ornaments, and an orange, a
stocking of candy and nuts, and a doll for each girl, and a knife
for each boy of her grandchildren, all of whom she invited for
dinner. Adam, 3d, sat at the head of the table, Mrs. Bates at the
foot. The tiniest tots that could be trusted without their
parents ranged on the Dictionary and the Bible, of which the Bates
family possessed a fat edition for birth records; no one had ever
used it for any other purpose, until it served to lift Hiram's
baby, Milly, on a level with her roast turkey and cranberry jelly.
For a year before her party Mrs. Bates planned for it. The tree
was beautiful, the gifts amazing, the dinner, as Kate cooked and
served it, a revelation, with its big centre basket of red,
yellow, and green apples, oranges, bananas, grapes, and flowers.
None of them ever had seen a table like that. Then when dinner
was over, Kate sat before the fire and in her clear voice, with
fine inflections, she read from the Big Book the story of the
guiding star and the little child in the manger. Then she told
stories, and they played games until four o'clock; and then Adam
rolled all of the children into the big wagon bed mounted on the
sled runners, and took them home. Then he came back and finished
the day. Mrs. Bates could scarcely be persuaded to go to bed.
When at last Kate went to put out her mother's light, and see that
her feet were warm and her covers tucked, she found her crying.
"Why, Mother!" exclaimed Kate in frank dismay. "Wasn't everything
all right?"
"I'm just so endurin' mad," sobbed Mrs. Bates, "that I could a-
most scream and throw things. Here I am, closer the end of my
string than anybody knows. Likely I'll not see another Christmas.
I've lived the most of my life, and never knowed there was a time
like that on earth to be had. There wasn't expense to it we
couldn't easy have stood, always. Now, at the end of my tether, I
go and do this for my grandchildren. 'Tween their little shining
faces and me, there kept coming all day the little, sad,
disappointed faces of you and Nancy Ellen, and Mary, and Hannah,
and Adam, and Andrew, and Hiram and all the others. Ever since he
went I've thought the one thing I COULDN'T DO WAS TO DIE AND FACE
ADAM BATES, but to-day I ain't felt so scared of him. Seems to me
HE has got about as much to account for as I have."