'Merry Chris'mas to ye, little boys!' it
seemed to say, and it untied our mufflers an' whirled the snow in our
faces, jist as if it was a boy, too, an' wanted to play with us. An
ol' crow came flappin' over us from the cornfield beyond the meadow.
He said: 'Caw, caw,' when he saw my new sled--I s'pose he'd never seen
a red one before. Otis had a hard time with _his_ sled--the black
one--an' he wondered why it wouldn't go as fast as mine would. 'Hev
you scraped the paint off'n the runners?' asked Wralsey Goodnow.
'Course I hev,' said Otis; 'broke my own knife an' Lute Ingraham's
a-doin' it, but it don't seem to make no dif'rence--the darned ol'
thing won't go!' Then, what did Simon Buzzell say but that, like's
not, it was because Otis's sled's name was 'Snow Queen.' 'Never did
see a girl sled that was worth a cent, anyway,' sez Simon. Well, now,
that jest about broke Otis up in business. 'It ain't a girl sled,' sez
he, 'and its name ain't "Snow Queen"! I'm a-goin' to call it "Dan'l
Webster," or "Ol'ver Optic," or "Sheriff Robbins," or after some other
big man!' An' the boys plagued him so much about that pesky girl sled
that he scratched off the name, an', as I remember, it _did_ go better
after that!
"About the only thing," continued Joel, "that marred the harmony of
the occasion, as the editor of the _Hampshire County Phoenix_ used to
say, was the ashes that Deacon Morris Frisbie sprinkled out in front
of his house. He said he wasn't going to have folks breakin' their
necks jest on account of a lot of frivolous boys that was goin' to the
gallows as fas' as they could! Oh, how we hated him! and we'd have
snowballed him, too, if we hadn't been afraid of the constable that
lived next door.
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