rinnell's baby knows
Chris'mus air a-comin'?"

He glowered at her as he leaned on the axe. "I reckon Grinnell's old
baby dunno B from Bull-foot," he declared, gruffly.

The recollection of the message came over him. He had a pang of regret,
remembering all the old grudges against the Grinnells. They were
re-enforced by this irrepressible yearning after their baby, this
admission that they had aught which was not essentially despicable.
Nevertheless, he suddenly saw a reason for the Grinnell baby's
existence; he loaded up both arms with the sticks of wood, and, followed
by the peripatetic sun-bonnet, conscientiously weighed down with one
billet, he strode into the house, and let his burden fall with a mighty
clatter in the corner of the chimney. The sun-bonnet staggered up and
threw her stick on the top of the pile of wood.

Purdee, sitting silently smoking, glanced up at the noise. Abner took
advantage of the momentary notice to claim, too, the attention of his
mother. "I wish ye'd make Eunice quit talkin' 'bout the Grinnells' old
baby, like she war actially demented--uglies' bald-headed, slab-sided,
slobbery old baby I ever see--nare tooth in its head! I do despise them
Grinnells."

As he anticipated, his father spoke suddenly: "Ye jes keep away
from thar," he said, sternly. "I trest them folks no furder 'n a
rattlesnake."

"_I_ ain't consortin' along o' 'em," declared the boy. "But I actially
hed ter take Eunice by the scalp o' her head an' lug her off one day
when she hung on thar fence a-stare-gazin' Grinnell's baby like 'twar
fatten ter eat."

The child's mother, a cadaverous, pale woman, was listlessly stringing
the warping-bars with hanks of variegated yarn. The grandmother, who
conserved a much more active and youthful interest in life, took down a
brown gourd used as a scrap-basket that was on a protruding lath of the
clay-and-stick chimney, and hunted among the scraps of homespun and bits
of yarn stowed within it. The room was much like the gourd in its aged
brown tint; its indigenous aspect, as if it had not been made with
hands, but was some spontaneous production of the soil; with its bits
of bright color--the peppers hanging from the rafters, the rainbow-hued
yarn festooning the warping-bars, the red coals of the fire, the blue
and yellow ware ranged on the shelf, the brown puncheon floor and walls
and ceiling and chimney--it might have seemed the interior of a similar
gourd of gigantic proportions