Description
99 Linwood Street (in LibriVox 9th Anniversary Collection )
9 LINWOOD STREET
A CHRISTMAS STORY
A gray morning, the deck wet, the iron all beaded with
frost, all the longshoremen in heavy pea-jackets or
cardigans, the whole ship in a bustle, and the favored
first-class passengers just leaving.
One sad-looking Irish girl stands with her knit hood
already spotted with the rime, and you cannot tell
whether those are tears which hang from her black
eyelashes or whether the fog is beginning to freeze
there. What you see is that the poor thing looks right
and left and up the pier and down the pier, and that in
the whole crowd–they all seem so selfish–she sees
nobody. Hundreds of people going and coming, pushing and
hauling, and Nora’s big brother is not there, as he
promised to be and should be.
Mrs. Ohstrom, the motherly Swedish woman, who has
four children and ten tin cups and a great bed and five
trunks and a fatuous, feckless husband makes time,
between cousins and uncles and custom-house men and
sharpers, to run up every now and then to say that Nora
must not cry, that she must be easy, that she has spoken
to the master and the master has said they are three
hours earlier than they were expected. And all this
was so kindly meant and so kindly said that poor Nora
brushed the tears away, if they were tears, and thanked
her, though she did not understand one word that dear
Mrs. Ohstrom said to her. What is language, or what are
words, after all?
And the bright-buttoned, daintily dressed little
ship’s doctor, whom poor Nora hardly knew in his shore
finery,–he made time to stop and tell her that the ship
was too early, and that she must not worry. Father, was
it, she was waiting for? "Oh, brother! Oh, he will be
