'What has the fellow been about, I wonder? I know 'twasn't respect for the holiday kept him indoors all the morning.'
It was presently explained. Andy, ignorant of courses, dished up, together with the ham, a very fine dumpling emitting the odour of apples.
'Sure, as ye can't have yer own plum puddin' in this outlandish counthry, ye can have a thing the same shape, anyhow. Mrs. Jackey showed me how to make it iligant, of the string of dried bits I had thrun in the box since we kem here first. Throth an' I'm cur'ous to see did they ever swell out agin, afther the parchin' they got.'
But for a slightly peculiar taste in the sweet, the dumpling was unimpeachable.
'I suppose Mrs. Jackey uses maple sugar in her confectionery,' said Robert; 'a _soupçon_ of trees runs through it.'
Late in the evening, as the pitch-pine logs were flaring abundance of light through the cabin--light upon Robert at his shingles, and upon Arthur at his work-bench, and upon Andy shaving and packing the slips of white pine as fast as his master split them, with a stinging night outside, some twenty-five degrees below zero, and the snow crusted at top hard enough to bear anything--all three raised their heads to listen to some approaching sound through the dead silence of the frozen air. It was a very distant vagrant tinkling, as of sheep-bells on a common in old Europe; they looked at one another, and Andy crossed himself reverently.
'Like chapel bells over the say from poor Ireland,' he muttered, and crept to the door, which Robert had opened. 'Sure there isn't fairies all the ways out here? an' 'tis mighty like it'--
'Hush--h--!' Andy crossed himself again as the tinkling became more plainly audible. A sweetly plaintive jangling it seemed--a tangled careless music. Nearer, and still nearer it came.
'What a fool I am!' exclaimed Robert; 'it must be sleigh-bells. Travellers, I suppose.'
And before many minutes were past, the sleigh had rounded its way among the stumps, over the smooth snow, to the shanty door, filled with brilliant wood-light.
From the buffalo robes of the sleigh emerged a gentleman so wrapped in lynx-furs and bearskin, that, until his face stood revealed by the firelight, nothing but his voice was recognisable by the Wynns.