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In the centre is the plaza, into which converge several streets of old-fashioned, sedate-looking Spanish houses, with broad verandas and heavy folding-shutters. Now a change has rudely come over them. Above the door of one appeared, in huge characters "American Hotel"; while a board announced that "Good Lodging, Brandy Smashes, Sice, and Egg-nog," were to be obtained within.
It was through Tillie that we discovered that the help were having egg-nog twice a day, with eggs as scarce as hens' teeth, and the pharmacy clerk putting in a requisition for more whisky every week. Well, I scribbled a note to Mr.
Nobody spoke to me except a policeman. He told me to keep moving. Finally I went into a little family liquor store. Strangely enough, considering the season, there was nobody there except the proprietor. He was reading a German newspaper behind the bar. I conferred with him concerning the advisability of an egg-nog. He had never heard of such a thing as an egg-nog.
You are a lie-yer, Marse Alfred, and you know how it is yourself; and I beg your pardon, sir, for slighting the perfession; but when I was a little gal, I got my scare of lie-yers, and it has stuck to me like a kuckleburrow. One Christmas eve jest before ole Marster got married, he had a egg-nog party; and a lot of gentlemen was standing 'round the table in the dining-room. One of 'em was ole Mr.
"And I said to myself, 'Nice fresh eggs like these are too good for anybody less than a preacher. So I brought them. There's just half a dozen, he ought to eat that many in one day." "Oh, yes, easily. He is very fond of egg-nog." David sputtered feebly among the pillows. "Oh, easily," he echoed helplessly. "I knew a woman that ate eighteen eggs every day," said Mrs. Sater encouragingly.
He'd been momentarily expecting her to offer him an egg-nog. But this paroxysm of tact that had just broken out in his office was really too much. Of course they'd been talking him over, those two. It must have been amply obvious to them for a good while that there was something more than met the eye, about that long visit of his wife's to California.
The crackling logs and dancing flames in the huge old-fashioned fireplace in the hall, the tree with its myriad of lighted candles, the many guests from county's end to county's end, the delicious supper and foaming egg-nog, and, last of all, the Virginia reel danced in the vast parlors and led by Colonel Bushrod Ball and Madam Beverly, who had not missed a Christmas night at Elmwood since she was a bride some sixty years ago, made a memory to last through life, a memory more than beautiful if He drew in a deep breath.
When I came to meet her, over a glass of the mild egg-nog which she served at her house on Sunday nights, and she told me about Heine, and how he looked, and some few things he said, I suffered an indescribable disappointment; and if I could have been frank with myself I should have owned to a fear that it might have been something like that, if I had myself met the poet in the flesh, and tried to hold the intimate converse with him that I held in the spirit.
I had crawled painfully out of bed, and was in the act of pouring the egg-nog down the pipe of the washstand. I paused, with the glass in the air. "A woman!" I repeated, startled. "What makes you think that?" "You don't know the first principles of a good detective yarn," he said scornfully. "Of course, it was the woman in the empty house next door. You said it was brass pipes, you will remember.
Then Nurse brought a big bowl filled with darting blue flames. The courageous shut one or both eyes, stuck in a fearful finger and extracted a fig or a fat raisin. Egg-nog and roasted Italian chestnuts completed Estelle's entertainment save for the holiday dinner of roast beef and plum pudding to follow on the morrow.
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