I told them I had felt awfully bad about the rat, because me and Waterloo was partly responsible, and they kinder smiled. But I couldn't let them think that I had _made_ up the towel story, so I told them if they would come around on the side that faces our house I'd show them. Mr. St. John and Miss Merle looked at each other very peculiar and he said: "It's a shame to disappoint the children!" which she didn't make any answer to, but she looked _tolerable_ agreeable. Then I begged them to come on around to Mr. St. John's window and I could show them I wasn't any story. "My window!" he said, looking surprised; then his face turned red. "Why, it must have been my er--_shirt_ I hung there last night to dry after I was out in that shower!" We couldn't help from laughing, all of us; but he laughs like the corners of his mouth ain't used to it. That is one bad thing about a dignified man--they're always afraid to let their mouth muscles stretch. Miss Merle caught me and Jean by the hand with a smile and said let's go and see what that signal looked like that brought Ann over in such a hurry. "A shirt is a highly proper thing to discuss--since Thomas Hood," she said as we started down the steps. "Pray don't," he said, the corners of his mouth wrinkling again, but his face just covered with red. "I'll be the happiest man on earth, Merle, if you'll just forgive me for my asininity; but--_do_ come back!---- For it's an _undershirt_!" CHAPTER XI "Come on in, the egg-nog's fine," Rufe called out to us as we came up the walk to the side gate this morning, a beautiful Christmas morning, after a long tramp down through the wood lot and up the ravine. "Come on out, the ozone's finer," Cousin Eunice sang back at him; then stopped still, leaned against the gate-post and looked up at the mistletoe hanging in the trees all about. "You can get ozone three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, egg-nog but one!" he hollered again, but I saw him set his glass down and start to swing Waterloo up on his shoulder. No matter how long they have been married you can always find Rufe wanting to be where Cousin Eunice is, and vice versa. Long ago anybody reading in my diary would have seen that mother is the kind of woman who loves to mother anything that needs it, from a little chicken with the gapes to a college professor out in a storm without his rubbers; and the latest notion she has taken up is to see that Miss Martha Claxton, one of the teachers in a girls' school that has been opened up near here, shall not get homesick during the week-ends. We all like her, Mammy Lou even saving the top of the churning every Friday to make cottage cheese for her; and Cousin Eunice said she knew she was a kindred spirit as soon as she said she could eat a bottle of olives at one sitting and _loved_ Baby Stuart's picture. So we invited her to go walking with us this morning and Cousin Eunice told her all about her courting in the ravine.