That you may thoroughly comprehend how it happened that on last Christmas Day Thaddeus meted out gifts of value so unprecedented to the domestics of what he has come to call his “menagerie”—the term menage having seemed to him totally inadequate to express the state of affairs in his household—I must go back to the beginning of last autumn, and narrate a few of the incidents that took place between that period and the season of Peace on Earth and Good-will to Men. Should I not do so there would be many, I doubt not, who would deem Thaddeus’s course unjustifiable, especially when we are all agreed that Christmas Day should be for all sorts and conditions of men the gladdest, happiest day of all the year.

Thaddeus and Bessie and the little Thad had returned to their attractive home after an absence of two months in a section of the Adirondacks whither the march of civilization had not carried such comforts as gas, good beds, and other luxuries, to which the little family had become so accustomed that real camp-life, with its beds of balsam, lights of tallow, and “fried coffee,” possessed no charms for them. They were all renewed in spirit and quite ready to embark once more upon the troubled seas of house-keeping; and, as they saw it on that first night at home, their crew was a most excellent one. The cook rose almost to the exalted level of a chef in the estimation of Thaddeus as course upon course, to the number of seven, each made up of some delicacy of the season, came to the table and received the indorsement which comes from total consumption. They were well served, too, these courses; and the two heads of the family, when Mary, the waitress, would enter the butler’s pantry, leaving them alone and unobserved, nodded their satisfaction to each other across the snow-white cloth, and by means of certain well-established signals, such as shaking their own hands and winking the left eye simultaneously, with an almost vicious jerk of the head, silently congratulated themselves upon the prospects of a peaceful future in a domestic sense.

“That was just the best dinner I have had in centuries,” said Thaddeus, as they adjourned to the library after the meal was over. “The broiled chicken was so good, Bess, that for a moment I wished I were a bachelor again, so that I could have it all; and after I got over my first feeling of hesitation over the oysters, and realized that it was September with an R—belated, it is true, but still there—and ate six of them, I think I could have gone down-stairs and given cook a diamond ring with seven solitaires in it and a receipted bill for a seal-skin sacque. I don’t see how we ever could have thought of discharging her last June, do you?”

“It was a good dinner,” said Bessie, discreetly ignoring the allusion to their intentions in June; for she had a well-defined recollection that at that time Bridget had given signs of emotional insanity every time she was asked to prepare a five-o’clock breakfast for Thaddeus and his friends, to the number of six, who had acquired the habit of going off on little shooting trips every Saturday, making the home of Thaddeus their headquarters over Sunday, when the game the huntsmen had bagged the day before had to be plucked, cleaned, and cooked by her own hands for dinner. “And it was nicely selected, too,” she added. “I sometimes think that I’ll let Bridget do the ordering at the market.”

“H’m! Well,” said Thaddeus, shaking his head dubiously, “I haven’t a doubt that Bridget could do it, and would be very glad to do it; but I don’t believe in setting a cook up in business.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that I haven’t any doubt that Bridget would in a very short time become a highly successful produce-broker with bull tendencies. The chicken market would be buoyant, and the quotations on the Stock Exchange of, say, B., S., and P.-U.-C.—otherwise, Beef, Succotash, and Picked-Up-Codfish—would rise to the highest point in years. Why, my dear, by Christmas-time cook would have our surplus in her own pocket-book; and in the place of the customary five oranges and an apple she would receive from the butcher a Christmas-card in the shape of a check of massive, if not graceful, proportions. No, Bess, I think the old way is the best.”

“Perhaps it is. By-the-way, John has kept the grounds looking well, hasn’t he? The lawn doesn’t seem to have a weed on it,” said Bessie, walking to the window and gazing out at the soft velvety sward in the glow of twilight.

“Yes, it looks pretty well; but there’s a small heap of stuff over there near the fence which rather inclines me to believe that the weeds have been pulled out within the last few days—in fact, since you wrote to announce our return. John is an energetic man in an emergency, and I haven’t a doubt he has been here at least once a week ever since we left. I’ll keep a record of John this fall.”

And so the two contented home-comers talked happily along, and when they closed their eyes in sleep that night they were, upon the whole, very well satisfied with life.

Weeks elapsed, and with them some of the air-castles collapsed. Whether custom staled the infinite variety of the cook’s virtues, and age withered the efficiency of Mary, the waitress, or whether something was really and radically wrong with the girls, Thaddeus and Bessie could not make out. Certain it was, however, that by slow degrees the satisfaction for which that first dinner seemed to stand as guarantor wore away, and dissatisfaction entered the household. Mary developed a fondness for church at most inconvenient hours—hours at which in fact, neither Thaddeus nor Bessie had ever supposed church could be. That it was eternal they both knew, but they had always supposed there were intermissions. Then the cook’s family, which had hitherto been moderately healthful, began to show signs of invalidism, though no such calamity as actual dissolution ever set its devastating step within the charmed circle of her relatives. Cousins fell ill whom she alone could comfort; nephews developed maladies for which she alone could care; and, according to Thaddeus’s record, John had been compelled on penalty of a fine to attend the funerals of some twenty-four deceased intimate friends in less than two months, although the newspapers contained no mention of the existence of a possible epidemic in the Celtic quarter. It is true that John showed a more pronounced desire to make his absence less inconvenient to his employer than did Mary and the cook, by providing a substitute when the Ancient Order of Funereal Hibernians compelled him to desert the post of duty; but Thaddeus declared the “remedy worse than the disease,” for the reason that John’s substitute—his own brother-in-law—was a weaver by trade, whose baskets the public did not appreciate, and whose manner of cutting grass in the early fall and of tending furnace later on was atrocious.

“If I could hire that man in summer,” Thaddeus remarked one night when John’s substitute had “fixed” the furnace so that the library resembled a cold-storage room, “I think we could make this house an arctic paradise. He seems to have a genius for taking warmth by the neck and shaking enough degrees of heat out of it to turn a conflagration into an iceberg. I think I’ll tell the Fire Commissioners about him.”

“He can’t compare with John,” was Bessie’s answer to this.

“No. I think that’s why John sends him here when he is off riding in carriages in honor of his deceased chums. By the side of Dennis, John is a jewel.”

“John is very faithful with the furnace,” said Bessie. “He never lets it go down. Why, day before yesterday I turned off every register in the house, and even then had to open all the windows to keep from suffocating.”

“But that wasn’t all John, my dear,” said Thaddeus. “The Weather Bureau had something to do with it. It was a warm day for this season of the year, anyhow. If John could combine the two businesses of selling coal and feeding furnaces, I think he would become a millionaire. And, by-the-way, I think you ought to speak to him, Bess, about the windows. Since you gave him the work of window-cleaning to do, it is evident that he thinks I have nothing to say in the matter, for he persistently ignores my requests that he clean them in squares as they are made, and not rub up a little circle in the middle, so that they look like blocks of opalescent glass with plate-glass bulls’-eyes let into the centre. Look at them now.”

“Dennis did that. John had to go to Mount Vernon with his militia company to-day.”

“Dennis is well named, for his name is—But never mind. I’ll credit John with his twelfth day off in four weeks.”

From John to Bridget, in the matter of days off, was an easy step, though such was Bessie’s consummate diplomacy that Thaddeus would probably have continued in ignorance of the extent to which Bridget absented herself had they not both taken occasion one day to visit some relatives in Philadelphia, and on their return home at night found no dinner awaiting them.

“What’s the matter now?” asked Thaddeus, a little crossly, perhaps, for visiting relatives in Philadelphia irritated him—possibly because he and they did not agree in politics, and their assumption that Thaddeus’s party was entirely made up of the ignorant and self-seeking was galling to him. “Why isn’t dinner ready?”

“Mary says that an hour after we left cook got a telegram from New York saying that her brother was dying, and she had to go right off.”

“I thought that brother was dying last week?”

“No; that was her mother’s brother, he got well. This is another person entirely.”

“Naturally,” snapped Thaddeus. “But next time we get a cook let’s have one whose relatives are all dead, or in the old country, where they can’t be reached. I’m tired of this business.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be cross with me about it, Thad,” said Bessie, with a teary look in her eyes. “I have to put up with a great deal more of it than you have, only you never know of it. Why, I’ve cooked one-half of my own luncheons in the last month.”

“And the dinners, too, I’ll wager,” growled Thaddeus.

“No; she’s always got home for dinner heretofore.”

“Well, we’ll keep a record-book for her, too, then. And we’ll be generous with her. We’ll allow her just as I was allowed in college—twenty-five per cent. in cuts. If she has twenty-five and a fifth per cent. she goes.”

“I don’t think I understand,” said Bessie.

“Well, we’ll put it this way: There are thirty days in a month. That means ninety meals a month. If she cooks sixty-seven and a half of them she can stay; if she fails to cook the other twenty-two and a half she can stay; but woe be unto her if she slips up by even so little as a millionth part of the sixty-eighth!”

“I don’t see how you can manage the half part of it.”

“We’ll leave that to her,” said Thaddeus, firmly; “and, what is more, we’ll put John and Mary on the same basis, and Dennis we won’t have on any basis at all. A man who will take advantage of his brother’s absence at a wake to black the shoes of that brother’s only employer with stove-polish is not the kind of a man I want to have around.”

“It will be a very good plan,” said Bessie, “for all except Mary. Her absences she cannot well avoid. She has to go to church.”

“How many times a week does she have to go?” queried Thaddeus.

“She is required to go to confession.”

“Well, let her reform, and then she’ll have nothing to go to confession for. I don’t believe that’s where she goes, either. I notice that one-half those evenings she takes off, permitting me to mind the front door, and enabling us both to acquire proficiency in the art of helping ourselves at dinner, there’s a fireman’s ball or a policeman’s hop or a letter-carriers’ theatre party going on somewhere in the county, and it’s my belief the worshipping she does on these occasions is at the shrine of Terpsichore or that of Melpomene, which is a heathen custom and not to be tolerated here. If she’s so fond of living in church we can quote to her Hamlet’s advice to Ophelia—‘Get thee to a nunnery!’ Why, Bess, I was mortified to death the other night when Bradley dined here, he’s all the time bragging about his menagerie, and I tried to bluff him out and make him believe we were waited on by angels in disguise, and you know what happened. He came, saw, and I was regularly knocked out. You let us in; we waited on ourselves; cook had prepared the seven-o’clock dinner at five to give her a chance to go to the hospital to see her brother-in-law with the measles; John had one of his Central-African fires on, and Bradley’s laughing about it yet.”

“Mr. Bradley was very disagreeable the other night, anyhow,” sniffed Bessie. “He acted as if he were camping out!”

“Well, I can’t honestly say I blame him for that,” retorted Thaddeus. “It only needed a balsam bed and a hole in the roof to let the rain in on him to complete the illusion.”

Finally, December came, and the tendencies of absenteeism on the part of the servants showed no signs of abatement. They were remonstrated with, but it made no difference. They didn’t go out, they declared, because they wanted to, but because they had to. Cook couldn’t let her relatives go unattended. Mary’s religious scruples simply dragged her out of the house, try as she would to stay in; and as for John, as long as Dennis was on hand to take his place he couldn’t see why Mr. Perkins was dissatisfied. To tell the truth, John had recently imbibed some more or less capitalistic—or anticapitalistic—doctrines, and he was quite incapable of understanding why, if a street-contractor, for instance, was permitted by the laws of the land to sublet the work for which he had contracted, he, John, should not be permitted to sublet his contract to Dennis, piecemeal, or even as a whole, if he saw fit to do so.

Thaddeus, seeing that Bessie was very much upset by the condition of affairs, had said little about it since Thanksgiving Day, when he had said about as much as the subject warranted after a six-course dinner had been hurried through in one hour, two courses having been omitted that Bridget might catch the train leaving for New York at 3.10. Nor would he have said anything further than the final words of dismissal had he not come home late one afternoon to dress for a dinner at his club, when he discovered that, owing to the usual causes, the week’s wash, which the combined efforts of cook and waitress should have finished that day, was delayed twenty-four hours, the consequence being that Thaddeus had to telephone to the haberdashery for a dress-shirt and collar.

“It’s bad enough having one’s wife buy these things for one, but when it comes to having a salesman sell you over a telephone the style of shirt and collar ‘he always wears himself,’ it is maddening,” began Thaddeus, and then he went on at such an outrageous rate that Bessie became hysterical, and Thaddeus’s conscience would not permit of his going out at all that night, and that was the beginning of the end.

“I’ll fix ’em at Christmas-time,” said Thaddeus.

“You won’t forget them at Christmas, I hope, Thad,” said Bessie, whose forgiving nature would not hear of anything so ungenerous as forgetting the servants during the holidays.

“No,” laughed Thaddeus. “I won’t forget ’em. I’ll give ’em all the very things they like best.”

“Oh, I see,” smiled Bessie. “On the coals-of-fire principle. Well, I shouldn’t wonder but it would work admirably. Perhaps they’ll be so ashamed they’ll do better.”

“Perhaps—if the coals do not burn too deep,” said Thaddeus, with a significant smile.

Christmas Eve arrived, and little Thad’s tree was dressed, the gifts were arranged beneath it, and all seemed in readiness for the dawning of the festal day, when Bessie, taking a mental inventory of the packages and discovering nothing among them for the servants save her own usual contribution of a dress and a pair of gloves for each, turned and said to Thaddeus:

“Where are the hot coals?”

“The what?” asked Thaddeus.

“The coals of fire for the girls and John.”

“Oh!” Thaddeus replied, “I have ’em in the library. I don’t think they’ll go well with the tree.”

“What are they?” queried Bess, with a natural show of curiosity. “Checks?”

“Yes, partly,” said Thaddeus. “Mary is to have a check for $16, Bridget one for $18, and John one for $40.”

“Why, Thaddeus, that’s extravagant. Now, my dear, there’s no use of your doing anything of that—”

“Wait and see,” said Thaddeus.

“But, Teddy!” Bessie remonstrated. “Those are the amounts of their wages. You will spoil them, and if I—”

“As I said before, wait, Bess, wait!” said Thaddeus, calmly. “You’ll understand the whole scheme to-morrow, after breakfast.”

And she did, and when she did she almost wished for a moment that she didn’t, for after breakfast Thaddeus summoned the three offenders into his presence, and the effect was not altogether free from painful features to the forgiving Bess.

“Bridget,” Thaddeus said, “do you remember what Mrs. Perkins gave you last Christmas?”

“I do not!” replied Bridget, rather uncompromisingly; for it was a matter of history that she thought Mrs. Perkins on the last Christmas festival had shown signs of parsimony in giving her a calico gown instead of one of silk.

“Well, you won’t forget next year what you got this,” said Thaddeus, dryly. “Here is an envelope containing $18, the amount of your wages until January 1st. Mary, what did you get last Christmas?”

“A box of candy, sir.”

“Nothing else?”

“I believe there was a dress of some kind. I gave it to my cousin.”

“Good. I am glad you were so generous. Here is an envelope for you. It has $16 in it, your wages up to January 1st.”

Bessie stood in the doorway, a mute witness to what seemed to her an incomprehensible scene.

“John, what did you get?”

“Five dollars an’ a day off.”

“And a two-dollar bill for Dennis, eh?”

“Dennis got that.”

“True. Well, John, here’s $40 for you—that pays you until January 1st. Now, it strikes me that, considering the behavior of you three people, I am very generous to pay you your wages a week in advance, but I am not going to stop there. I have studied you all very carefully, and I’ve tried to discover what it is you are fondest of. Cook and Mary do not seem to care much for dresses, though I believe there are dresses and gloves under the tree for them, which fact they will doubtless forget by next Christmas Day. The five dollars and a day off John seems to remember, though from his manner of recalling it I do not think his remembrance is a very pleasing one. Now I’ve found out what it is you all like the best, and I’m going to give it to you.”

Here the trio endeavored to appear gracious, though they were manifestly uneasy and a bit dissatisfied with what John would have called “the luks of t’ings.”

“Cook, from the 1st of January, may go to her relatives, and stay until they’re every one of them restored to health, if it takes forty years. Mary may consider herself presented with sixty years’ vacation without pay; and for you, John, I have written this letter of recommendation to the proprietors of a large undertaking establishment in New York, who will, I trust, engage you as a chief mourner, or perhaps hearse-driver, for the balance of your days. At any rate, you, too, after January 1st, may consider yourself free to go to any funeral or militia exercises, or anything else you may choose to honor with your presence, at your own expense. You are all given leave of absence without pay until further notice. I wish you a merry Christmas. Good-morning.”

There were no farewells in the house that day; and inasmuch as there was no Christmas dinner either, Thaddeus and Bessie did not miss the service of the waitress, who, when last seen, was walking airily off towards the station, accompanied by the indignant John and a bundle-laden cook. Next day their trunks went also.

“It was rather a hard thing to do on Christmas Day, Thaddeus,” said Bessie, a little later.

“Oh no,” quibbled Thaddeus. “It was very easy under the circumstances, and quite appropriate. This is the time of peace on earth and good-will to men. The only way for us to have peace on earth was to get rid of those two women; and as for John, he has my good-will, now that he is no longer in my employ.”