I hated to be leaving
home on Christmas Eve, for I never had done that before, and I hated to
be leaving my wife alone with the children and the two girls in our
little house in Cambridge. Before I started in on the old horse-car for
Boston, I had helped her to tuck the young ones in and to fill the
stockings hung along the wall over the register--the nearest we could
come to a fireplace--and I thought those stockings looked very weird,
five of them, dangling lumpily down, and I kept seeing them, and her
sitting up sewing in front of them, and afraid to go to bed on account
of burglars. I suppose she was shyer of burglars than any woman ever was
that had never seen a sign of them. She was always calling me up, to go
down-stairs and put them out, and I used to wander all over the house,
from attic to cellar, in my nighty, with a lamp in one hand and a poker
in the other, so that no burglar could have missed me if he had wanted
an easy mark. I always kept a lamp and a poker handy."
The stranger heaved a sigh as of fond reminiscence, and looked round for
the sympathy which in our company of bachelors he failed of; even the
sympathetic Rulledge failed of the necessary experience to move him in
compassionate response.
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