Little Merry Christmas

Pancakes for Two

In the kitchen wing of the old-fashioned brown house an old man was just beginning to get supper, a choleric old man, if one could judge by the bushy fierceness of the shaggy eyebrows above the sharp blue eyes, and the aggressive slant of the gray chin whisker. Mr. Lemuel Perkins had come in rather late from a particularly heated meeting of the village debating society, in grocery store assembled, and you will have to admit that it is not a soothing experience for a hungry man to find the kitchen in dire confusion, the fire in the cook stove nothing but a mass of embers, and not a sign of supper in sight unless the attenuated remains of a solitary dinner answer that description.

A fire was blazing in the stove now, however; and, girdled in a blue gingham apron, Mr. Perkins was adding to the general confusion on the kitchen table by trying to “stir up” something for supper, with the aid of a “ring-streaked and spotted” recipe book. Intent upon discovering whether a certain eleven was really eleven or only a one and a fly speck, Mr. Perkins totally disregarded the sound of “some one gently tapping, tapping” at his kitchen door, and did not even realize that it had been pushed open till a brisk young voice inquired:

“How do you do! Does my uncle, Mr. Lemuel Perkins, live here?”

“Huh?” demanded Mr. Perkins, whirling about, recipe book in hand, and eyeing the intruder fiercely.

But fierce looks can find no entrance through a pair of rose-colored spectacles that are radiating sunshine and goodwill as hard as ever they can.

“Oh, you are Uncle Lemuel!” cried a happy little voice, while its owner rushed headlong across the kitchen with outstretched arms. “I’m so glad to see you.” With a gay little spring she planted a kiss on the tip of the bristling chin whisker. “I’m your grandniece, Mary, and I’ve come to spend Christmas with you for a surprise. Have you had scarlet fever?”

“Huh?” inquired Mr. Perkins again, a trifle less fierce, but much more bewildered.

“Scarlet fever?” shrieked Mary, deciding at once that of course a proper great-uncle would be deaf. “Have—you—had—scarlet fever? I’ve—been exposed!”

“For the land sakes, little gal, quit your yellin’! I ain’t deef,” retorted Mr. Perkins. “Who’d you say you was?”

“Mary, your niece; but I’m not a little girl. I’m thirteen and a half. Mother says I’m a real little woman.”

“She does, does she? Waal, we’ll see which on us is right about it. Is there one cup of flour in pancakes, or eleven? This blamed receipt book is so messed up I can’t tell.”

“Oh, are you making pancakes?” returned his guest joyfully. “I’m so glad. I was afraid you’d be through supper, and I’m almost starved. You wouldn’t let me make the pancakes, would you, Uncle Lemuel? India’s not a very suitable place for them, mother says, so we never had them much, but she let me make them once or twice, and I just love to hear them go splash on the griddle, and then bob up like a rubber ball, and then flop them over, all brown and lovely. It’s such fun! But probably you love to make them, too. I oughtn’t to ask the first night, I suppose.”

Uncle Lemuel’s visage, being trained to express habitual displeasure, had no difficulty in concealing the feelings of joy that coursed through him at these words. As he himself would have expressed it, he “hated like dumb p’ison to cook a meal of vittles,” but it was against Uncle Lemuel’s principles to display satisfaction with the happenings of the world about him.

“Well,” he responded slowly, “if you’re so set on it, I s’pose you might as well. Only don’t be wasteful now, and stir up a mess we can’t eat.”

He handed over the recipe book with a grudging air that would have deceived the very elect.

“I won’t,” promised his guest happily, whisking off her coat with one hand and her hat with the other, and finally finding a satisfactory place for them on a remote rocking-chair covered with red calico. “What fun, starting in housekeeping with you right away like this! And such a grand fire! Will you set the table, and have you got some real maple sirup? I don’t think they have at school, but mother said you and Aunt Nancy got it right from your own trees. Do you keep them in the back yard, and go out, and draw some when you want it, as if you were milking a cow?”

She was diving into her russet leather handbag as she spoke, and presently she pulled out a blue gingham apron with triumphant glee.

“Here’s my big kitchen apron. Isn’t it the luckiest thing that I brought it in my handbag? I didn’t have a chance to wear it at school, so I left it out of my trunk, and then I ran across it at the last minute, and tucked it in here. Everything does turn out so grandly! Why, see, our aprons match! How funny! We’re twins, aren’t we? Will you button me up in the back, please, and then I’ll tie yours again. Yours is slipping off.”

In another moment the dazed Mr. Perkins found himself fumbling with the buttons on a small blue gingham back; and then, before he could even think of the first letter of Jack Robinson’s name, a capable hand had tightened his own apron strings, and transported by two active little feet was marshalling the various “ingrejunts” that he had already gathered together on the kitchen table.

Muttering something about maple sirup, he retreated to the cellar to collect his wits, though he knew full well that the sirup can, since time immemorial, had occupied the right-hand end of the top “butt’ry” shelf.

By the time he returned the culinary operations had been transferred to the sink bench, and the kitchen table was laid for two. On the stove a shining griddle was smoking in anticipation, while the little cook was giving a last anxious whip to the batter.

“I couldn’t find the napkins, Uncle Lemuel,” she called, as the cellarway door opened. “Will you get them out, please, and put the butter and sirup on the table? Oh, I do pray these cakes will be good! It’s such a responsibility to cook for a grown-up man!”

A silence, heavy with the deepest anxiety, settled almost visibly over the Perkins kitchen from the first slap of the batter upon the smoking griddle, till three cakes had been duly “flopped” by the little cook’s careful hand. These, however, presented to view such beautiful, round, creamy countenances, almost obscured by very becoming brown lace veils, that two huge sighs of relief exhaled together; one of which was speedily transformed into a dry little cough, while Uncle Lemuel turned and tiptoed away in search of the tea caddy and the old brown pot.

“As soon as we get six, we can sit down and begin,” called Mary excitedly. “The stove’s so handy I can cook and eat, too. That’s such a nice thing about eating in the kitchen. We could never do that in India, there were always too many servants around, though mother tried to keep it as much like an American home as she could. That’s why she taught me to cook—so we could have American dishes.”

“Can you make pie?” queried Uncle Lemuel, through a mouthful so dripping with maple sirup that even his tones seemed sweetened.

“No, I can’t,” admitted Mary regretfully. “Father didn’t think pie was good for us, so mother never tried to manage that.”

All traces of sirup departed abruptly from Uncle Lemuel’s tones.

“Good for ye?” he growled. “Well, if that ain’t just like some folkses impudence! Good for ye? Humph! Mebbe if I hadn’t et it three times a day I mightn’t have had no more sprawl than to go out to Injy and lay round under a green cotton umbrell’ with a black feller fannin’ the flies off of me. Why, it’s eatin’ pie reg’lar that’s put the United States ahead of all the other nations of the world! It’s the bulwark of the American Constitution, pie is.”