The great day had come. Hannah and Liseke hadn't slept a wink all night.
Mitz and family had come purring into the room in the early morning, as
usual, but had been shamefully neglected. All six sat in a row by the
bedside, watching indignantly the two heads peeping out from the
feathers.
"To-day!" Hannah sighed rapturously.
How they got into their clothes, they never knew.
As for eating! why, they couldn't touch the delicious rolls, the glasses
of milk, even that delicious preserve, "Apfel-kraut."
Max alone was himself, and, in his injured way, managed to eat enough
for three. Yet, he was not satisfied; at the age of eight life had few
attractions left for him.
Who could believe that a September day would be so long? Or that the old
clock in the hall would go so ridiculously slow? There was a quiet
jocularity in the motion of its long pendulum, as if it were laughing
bitterly that anyone could be in a hurry. "Ha! ha! ha!" ticked the
clock.
"Oh, dear!" Hannah said with a sigh, "will it never be three?"
How they kept their ears open to hear a crowd of men come stumbling up
the stone steps with the weight of the piano!
"Perhaps it is already here," Liseke said, faintly.
"Perhaps it's coming," Hannah suggested, hopefully.
"One--two--three--," the clock struck.
"Come, mamma!" the children cried; and so they opened the sitting-room
door with trembling hands.
Nobody there; nothing there. Mamma sat down in a corner and began
knitting, while the children looked out of the window into the narrow
street to see a wagon drive up to the house.
"Perhaps they've forgotten all about it," Liseke was saying tremulously,
when the sitting-room door burst open and there stood Max and behind
him, papa Karl.
"Oh, Max, Max, where's the surprise?" the children implored.
"Why, don't you see!" Max cried, mightily injured, and turning himself
about disclosed his small person arrayed in a new velveteen suit
brilliant with brass buttons.
"Oh--dear--dear," sobbed little Hannah with the tears rolling down, "we
thought it was a piano!'
"Did I say it was a piano?" Max howled.
"You said it--it--was--was--covered with pl--plush," Liseke sobbed.
"Well, isn't it?"
"And--and you said it 'ud make a noise if one b--banged on it," Hannah
cried, piteously.
"Well, see if it don't!" Max shrieked, when papa Karl's hand came down
upon him with such superb effect there was no doubting the truth of the
assertion.
"Ungrateful children, you are never satisfied," papa Karl cried
majestically. "No matter what I do for you, you're always ungrateful--"
[Illustration: THE SHAMEFULLY NEGLECTED SIX.]
"But Karl," mamma Betty interrupted, with quiet decision, in the midst
of a storm of sobs, "you can't expect the children to be very much
delighted because Max gets a new suit--something necessary."
"And it's so tight I can't breathe," Max cried, goaded to frenzy by the
general grief.
"Ingrates!" gasped papa Karl, and strode up and down the room, while
Liseke sobbed her grief out on mamma's shoulder, and Max hid his face in
her lap, and Hannah was bravely trying to dry her brown eyes.
"Karl, they are children," mamma Betty said: softly patting Max's head;
then lifting it up gently; "Max, go to the confectioners." Max sprang to
his feet as a war-horse at the sound of a trumpet.
"Here are ten groschens;"--mamma Betty took them out of her scanty purse
with something of a sigh;--"buy as much cake and whatever you like.
Liseke tell Marie to make a pitcher of chocolate instantly. My little
Hannah, you may set the table."
"Oh, mamma, may I put on the pretty china cups and saucers?" Hannah
pleaded, as Max and Liseke bounded out of the room.
"Yes, but be careful, my dear."
"Chocolate!" said papa Karl with some scorn, "bribing them for the sake
of peace."
They were children, she said. Had papa Karl forgotten that he, too, had
once been a child?
Papa Karl had forgotten this trifling circumstance but he magnanimously
declared he forgave them all.
There was a pattering of feet down the entry, and three tear-stained
faces looked timidly in.
"The chocolate is on the table," Hannah said bravely, with only one tiny
sob. Then the door closed and the little feet patted down the corridor.
"Come Karl, and drink a cup of chocolate. You need it as much as the
children, for you were disappointed also. You thought to give them a
pleasure, you mistaken man," mamma Betty said with a little smile.
"I really meant to," said Karl, quite softened.
Mamma Betty was just opening the door, when she suddenly paused.
"Karl," she said quite seriously, "will you promise me one thing?"
"Yes, my dear."
"Never surprise us again; surprises always end in disappointments."
"Well, Betty I promise," papa Karl said hurriedly, and he kept his word.
So years after, when papa Karl's purse was a good deal fuller, and a
piano did make its appearance, it was welcomed solemnly, as something
long and rapturously expected.