Queer Stories for Boys and Girls | Page 8

"Good-morning! Mr. Blake," said the three boys.
"Good-morning, my boys; I'm glad to see you," said the minister, and
he clapped "Old Ebony" down on the sidewalk, and it said "I am glad
to see you."
"Mr. Blake!" said Fred White, scratching his brown head and looking a
little puzzled. "Mr. Blake, if it ain't any harm--if you don't mind, you
know, telling a fellow,--a boy, I mean----" Just here he stopped talking;
for though he kept on scratching vigorously, no more words would
come; and comical Sammy Bantam, who stood alongside, whispered,
"Keep a-scratching, Fred; the old cow will give down after a while!"
Then Fred laughed, and the other boys, and the minister laughed, and
the cane could do nothing but stamp its foot in amusement.
"Well, Fred," said the minister, "what is it? Speak out." But Fred
couldn't speak now for laughing, and Sammy had to do the talking
himself. He was a stumpy boy, who had stopped off short; and you
couldn't guess his age, because his face was so much older than his
body.
"You see, Mr. Blake," said Sammy, "we boys wanted to know--if there
wasn't any harm in your telling--why, we wanted to know what kind of
a thing we are going to have on Christmas at our Sunday-school."

"Well, boys, I don't know any more about it yet than you do. The
teachers will talk it over at their next meeting. They have already
settled some things, but I have not heard what."
"I hope it will be something good to eat," said Tommy Puffer. Tommy's
body looked for all the world like a pudding-bag. It was an india-rubber
pudding-bag, though. I shouldn't like to say that Tommy was a glutton.
But I am sure that no boy of his age could put out of sight, in the same
space of time, so many dough-nuts, ginger-snaps, tea-cakes,
apple-dumplings, pumpkin-pies, jelly-tarts, puddings, ice-creams,
raisins, nuts, and other things of the sort. Other people stared at him in
wonder. He was never too full to take anything that was offered him,
and at parties his weak and foolish mother was always getting all she
could to stuff Tommy with. So when Tommy said he hoped it would be
something nice to eat, and rolled his soft lips about, as though he had a
cream-tart in his mouth, all the boys laughed, and Mr. Blake smiled. I
think even the cane would have smiled if it had thought it polite.
"I hope it'll be something pleasant," said Fred Welch.
"So do I," said stumpy little Tommy Bantam.
"So do I, boys," said Mr. Blake, as he turned away; and all the way
down the block Old Ebony kept calling back, "So do I, boys! so do I!"
Mr. Blake and his friend the cane kept on down the street, until they
stood in front of a building that was called "The Yellow Row." It was a
long, two-story frame building, that had once been inhabited by genteel
people. Why they ever built it in that shape, or why they daubed it with
yellow paint, is more than I can tell. But it had gone out of fashion, and
now it was, as the boys expressed it, "seedy." Old hats and old clothes
filled many of the places once filled by glass. Into one room of this row
Mr. Blake entered, saying:
"How are you, Aunt Parm'ly?"
"Howd'y, Mr. Blake, howd'y! I know'd you was a-comin', honey, fer I
hyeard the sound of yer cane afore you come in. I'm mis'able these yer

days, thank you. I'se got a headache, an' a backache, and a toothache in
de boot."
I suppose the poor old colored woman meant to say that she had a
toothache "to boot."
"You see, Mr. Blake, Jane's got a little sumpin to do now, and we can
git bread enough, thank the Lord, but as fer coal, that's the hardest of all.
We has to buy it by the bucketful, and that's mighty high at fifteen
cents a bucket. An' pears like we couldn't never git nothin' ahead on
account of my roomatiz. Where de coal's to come from dis ere winter I
don't know, cep de good Lord sends it down out of the sky; and I
reckon stone-coal don't never come dat dar road."
After some more talk, Mr. Blake went in to see Peter Sitles, the blind
broom-maker.
"I hyeard yer stick, preacher Blake," said Sitles. "That air stick o'
yourn's better'n a whole rigimint of doctors fer the blues. An' I've been
a-havin' on the blues powerful bad, Mr. Blake, these yer last few days. I
remembered what you was a-saying the last time you was here, about
trustin' of the good Lord. But I've had a purty consid'able heartache