Speaker 1: Asaf Sheaf's Christmas by Edward Everett Hale. Asaf had just
the Christmas presents he wanted. Wanted is hardly the word.
He had not supposed that a boy like him could
have such things for his own. His father and mother
gave him one present. It was a camera obscura and
thirty glass plates, all ready to take photographic views. They
were made to work by the new dry process, so
that without over nice manipulation of chemicals, Asaf could go
where he pleased and make his own photographs. What the
children gave him I must not tell. We have so
little room, But of all the children in Boston who
had their Christmas presents at breakfast, none was better pleased
than Asaf as he opened his parcels. It was afterwards
that his grief and sorrow came, when his mother's turn came,
and she opened the parcels on her table, For in
the Sheaf house each of them had a set separ
at present table. After she had passed the little children's,
she came to Asaf's present to her. It was in
quite a large box, done up in a German newspaper.
She opened it carefully and lifted out a Bohemian coffee pot,
which Aesaf had bought at the German woman's shop in
Shawmont Avenue. Missus Sheef eagerly expressed her delight and her
wonder that Asaf knew she wanted it, But alas all
her love could not hide the fact that the nose
of the coffee pot was broken at the end, and
what was left was all in splinters. Poor Aesf saw
it as soon as she, and the great big tears
would come to his manly eyes. He bent his head
down on his mother's shoulder, and the hot drops fell
on her cheek. She kissed the poor boy and told
him she should never mind. It would pour quite as well,
and she should use it every morning. She knew how
many months of his allowance had gone for this coffee pot.
She remembered how much she had been pleased with Missus Henry's,
and she praised Asaf for remembering that so well. This
is the joy of the present. She said that my
boy watches his mother's wishes, and that he thinks of her.
A chip more or less off the nose of the
coffee pot is nothing. And Asaf would not cheat the
others out of their good time, and he pretended to
be soothed, but all the same there was a great
lump in his throat. Almost all that day, when the
children were going to church, he walked with Isabel and
he told her how it all happened. He would not
tell his mother, and he made Isabel promise not to tell.
He had spent every cent of his money in buying
his presents. He had them all in that big basket
which they bought at the pier. He was coming home
after dark on foot because he could not pay his
fare in the horse car. All of a sudden a
little German boy with a tall woman by him, stopped
him and said, with a very droll accent, which Esaf imitated,
East Canton Street, and poked out a card on which
was written Karl Schoeneger seven twenty three East Canton Street.
Bell I was in despair. It was late. I was
on Dwight Street, and I led them to Chaumont Avenue
and tried to explain Belle. They did not know one
word of English except East Canton Street. They kept saying
East Canton Street as a dog says bow wow. I
looked for an officer and could not find one. It
snowed harder and harder. I was coward enough to think
of shirking. But then I said, lie and cheat on
Christmas Eve that you may lug home your Christmas presents,
that is to me. And I said, very loud, come here.
I guess that's good German anyway, and I dragged them
to their old seven twenty three East Canton Street. It
is a mile if it is an inch. I climbed
up the snowy steps to read the number, but I
slipped as I came down and knocked my own basket
off the step where it stood. That is how mamma's
coffee pot came to be broken, I suppose. But all
looked so steady in the basket that I never thought
of it. Then that's how I came late to supper.
But Bell, don't you ever tell Mamma as long as
you live? And Bell never did. She told me when
the Christmas dances were half over, when they had acted
Lochnavarre and Lord Ullen's Daughter, but before they acted Villikins
and Johnny the Miller. Supper was served in Missus Sheef's
dining room. All the best china was out Grandmamma's spoded out,
and the silver pitcher the hands gave Papa on his
fiftieth birthday, and missus Sheef's wedding breakfast set all that
was left of it, and Asaf's coffee pot held the
place of honor. One wretched bit of broken ware had
consented to be cemented in its place, But yet it
was but a miserable nose. And the lump came into
Aesaf's throat again as he looked at it, and he
almost wished his mother had put it away so that
he need not hear her tell Uncle Eliakim the hateful story.
The lump was in his throat when he went to bed,
but he fell asleep soon after. I must confess that
there were a few wet spots on his pillow. His
last thought was the memory that all his hoarded monthly
allowances had gone for the purchase of a broken nosed pitcher.
The two angels who watch his bedside saw this, and
one of them said to the other, would you not
tell him? But the other said, wait a little longer.
What the angels would not tell him, I will tell you.
For it happened that I was driving round in my
sleigh that Christmas night on the very snow which was falling.
While Esaf was fumbling up the steps in East Canton Street,
and I stopped at a house not far from Boylston
Station as you turn into Lambertine Street, and found myself
in the midst of the drollest home festivity. The father
was sitting with two babies on his knee, the other
children were delving in a trunk to find something which
would stay in the bottom the house. Mother clearly did
not know where anything was in the trunk or anywhere else,
but a broad grin was on every face, and whatever
was said was broken by ejaculations and occasional kisses. At last,
some lost parcel revealed itself and opened out into some
balls for a Christmas tree, which these honest people had
brought all the way from Lynz on the Danube, quite
sure that no such wonders would be known in that
far off America. There are many other tales to be
printed in this volume, so that I must not tell you,
as I should be glad to do, all the adventures
that that house mother and her three boys, and her
two girls and the twin babies had encountered as they
came from Lynz to join Hans Bergmann, the father of
the seven and the husband of their mother. He had
come the year before. They had come now by way
of Antwerp, and had landed in Philadelphia, but the Shiller
had made so short a run that when they arrived,
hans Bergmann was not in Philadelphia to meet them. Of course,
the Frau Bergmann should have waited in Philadelphia, as hans
Bergmann had bidden her, But on the hint of a
voluble woman who spoke pure Bohemian, whom she met on
the peer, who knew just where he boarded in New York,
she took her charge to New York to find that
he had left that boarding house three months before. Still
eager to spend Christmas with him, she had hurried to
Boston to ask his uncle where he was. She had
arrived in Boston with the snowstorm the day before Christmas itself,
having made an accidental detour by Bridgeport and Westfield. Happily
for her, the boy asaff had led her to Uncle
Carl's lodgings just as Uncle Carrol was leaving them forever
on his way to Chicago. Happily for hans Bergman, Uncle
Carl had the wit to pile them all into a
carriage and to send them to a friend of his
at the Boylestyn station, bidding him keep them under lock
and key. Then to Hans Bergmann, Uncle Carl telegraphed find
your wife at Burr Street, Num forty, Boyleston Station. Then
Hans Bergmann, who had been bullying every police station in
New York to know where his family was, had taken
the early train and had spent his Christmas in plowing
through snow drifts to Boston. And so it was that
at nine on Christmas night I saw the children in
a Christmas party, not quite as well arranged, but quite
as happy as any I saw that day. And all
this came about because a kind a Saf Sheaf forgot
himself on Christmas Eve and showed Frau Bergmann the way
to East Canton Street. As it happened, I saw the
diamond necklace that John Gilder gave his bride that night,
But it did not give so much pleasure as Asaf
Chief's Christmas present to the Bergmanns did, And yet he
never knew he gave it. End of Asaf Chef's Christmas
by Edward Everett Hale,