“I will see you then,” said Jasper, as the two hurried on to meet the Peppers rushing out from the little brown house, and down the small path.

“I’ve made an awful mess for ’em all, and they just come home,” groaned Mr. Tisbett; drawing his fur mitten across his eyes, and leading his horses, he followed at a funeral pace, careful not to stop at the gate until the door was closed, when he began furiously to unload.

A footstep crunching the snow, broke into the noise he was making.  “Hoh! well,” he exclaimed, pausing with a trunk half-off the rack, “it’s a mighty awkward thing for a man to say he’s sorry, but you bet I be, as cert’in as my name’s John Tisbett.”  His face became so very red that Jasper hastened to put his young shoulder under the trunk, a movement that only added to the stage-driver’s distress.

“It don’t pay to get mad, now I tell you,” declared Mr. Tisbett, dumping the trunk down on the snow, and then drawing himself to his full height; “fust place, your pa sassed me, and”—­

“He didn’t intend to,” cried Jasper eagerly, “and I’ll apologize for him, if that’s what you want.”  He laid his strong right hand in the old fur mitten.

“Good land!  Tain’t what I want,” cried honest John, but he gripped the hand nevertheless, a fact that the boy never forgot; “I say I’m sorry I shook up your pa.”

“His age ought to have protected him,” said the boy simply.

“Sho! that’s a fact,” cried Mr. Tisbett, sinking in deeper distress, “but how is anybody to remember he’s so old, when he steps so almighty high, as if he owned all Badgertown—­say!”

“I think we shall be good friends, Mr. Tisbett,” said Jasper cordially, as he turned to wave his hand toward the little brown house; simultaneously the door opened, and all the young Peppers and Whitneys rushed out to help in the delightful unloading.

It was well along in the afternoon.  The dusk of the December twilight shut down speedily, around the little brown house and its happy occupants, but no one wanted the candles lighted till the last moment.

“Oh, Polly!” cried Joel, who was prancing as of old over the kitchen floor, “don’t you remember that night when you said you wished you had two hundred candles, and you’d light them all at once?”

“I said a good many silly things in those days,” said Polly meditatively, and smoothing Phronsie’s yellow hair that was lying across her lap.

“Some silly ones, and a good many wise ones,” observed Mother Pepper, over in her little old rocker in the west window, where she used to sit sewing up coats and sacks for the village storekeeper.  “You kept us together many a time, Polly, when nothing else could.”

“Oh! no, I didn’t, Mamsie,” protested Polly, guilty of contradicting, “you and Bessie did.  I just washed dishes, and swept up, and”—­

“Baked and brewed, and fussed and stewed,” finished Joel, afraid of being too sentimental.