Chapter 12 - Stories For The Christmas Season

Three Young Kings By George Sumner Albee

The town of Cardenas, a hundred miles to the east of Havana on the north coast of Cuba, is an old dog a small, taffy-colored dog that is learning new tricks. Three times a week, nowadays, a ferry from Key West brings Cardenas a boatload of American tourists, and these Americans, all of whom have such white faces that they appear to have been sick, seem strange and wondrous to the people of the town. Small boys follow them on the sidewalks and, when they speak, race around in front in order to watch their lips form the mysterious, incomprehensible foreign words.

As for the small girls, they clap their hands over their mouths and giggle, for the American women often wear hats, and, as everybody knows, a hat is a garment worn solely by men. But the little girls' mothers shriek at them and snatch them indoors, for the Americans are bringing money into Cardenas and so they must be treated with the courtesy money deserves.

But this is the story of something that took place in Cardenas in the days before there were tourists or a ferry. At that time the young men sat all day on the iron rocking chairs in the park under the royal palms, talking excitedly about the day when they would go to work and make vast fortunes and buy fast automobiles. The shopkeepers opened at ten in the morning, strolled home at noon for heavy dinners of rice and black beans, took two-hour siestas and returned to their stores to play dominoes until suppertime, setting their prices sky-high so that would-be customers would not interrupt them. The women mopped their white tile floors, cooked, gossiped and, at dusk, locked themselves into the houses behind their heavy hardwood doors. And the children, when they had fathers who could pay the tuition, went to school. The boys, in white shirts and neckties of the soft blue that is the Virgin's own color, attended the Escuela Pia. The girls, in blue pinafores with white stripes around the hems of the skirts, went to the Escuela de las Madres Escolapias.

Which brings us to three boys of the Escuela Pias: Eduardo, Ramoncito and Lazaro.

Eduardo was sixteen, while Ramoncito and Lazaro were a few months younger. They were the oldest boys at the colegio and the biggest. In fact, Eduardo amounted to a giant in Cuba, where the horses are the size of large dogs and the dogs are not much larger than rabbits; his nickname was Elephant. He had a flat, snub-nosed face and a cubical skull on which his hair looked like a coat of glossy black lacquer because he soaked it daily in scented brilliantine. Ramoncito was finely made, with a headful of tight little curls and eyelashes half an inch long over eyes the color of clear green sea-water. Lazaro was the shortest of the three, but that did not keep him from being the heaviest. He was so fat that he exploded his clothes two and three times a day, popping shirt buttons and the seams of his knickerbockers or the buckles that fastened them at his plump knock-knees. Lazaro ate three huge meals a day, treated himself to custard eclairs on the way to school and fresh coconut macaroons on the way home, and devoted the recess periods to eating candy. Ramoncito's nickname was Monkey. Lazaro's was Macaroon.

The fact that they happened to be the three oldest students laid quite a few responsibilities on Eduardo, Ramoncito and Lazaro. When the school's forty-seven boys scrambled into the bus for the annual picnic at St. Michael of the Baths it was Eduardo, Ramoncito and Lazaro who served as monitors umpiring ball games, arbitrating quarrels, seeing to it that appearances and decorum were maintained in general. And at Christmastime, because they were the oldest, it was their duty to play the parts of the Three Kings of Orient.

Jesus' birthday in Cuba is a day to go to church, not a day for gifts. Gifts are distributed later, on the sixth of January, not by Santa Claus but by the Three Kings who carried gifts to the newborn Christ child in the manger at Bethlehem. On the second of January, therefore, Father Miguel called Eduardo, Ramoncito and Lazaro into his office.

"Seat thyselves," he directed them.

Father Miguel, who was eighty-two, was so frail that his white linen cassock appeared more often than not to be unoccupied. There was very little of him still in residence on earth. He had a small, poetically modeled head and a voice, and that was about all. His voice, after all the years away from home, still had the lisp of his native Asturian mountains, and it too was fragile a faint, musical buzz, like that made by a small but energetic fly in the schoolroom on a hot afternoon.

"Children," he said for he was so aged that he could no longer perceive the difference between sixteen and six, "I have done this many times, but it is new to you, so I must explain the procedure of the Three Kings. All of the gifts your schoolmates will receive from their families and friends are upstairs in the janitor's room. The gifts for the girls are here as well; Mother Superior brought them over to me from Madres Escolapias. I want you here two hours before dusk on Day Five to load the mules, saddle the horses and disguise yourselves in your robes and turbans. The robes will fit; they always do. Do you ride well?"

"Yes, Father," murmured the boys. All Cuban boys ride well, using neither saddle nor bridle but only a length of rope looped at one end around the horse's muzzle.

"Bueno; you will be handsomely mounted. Don Alfredo de la Torre is sending me three cream-colored mares from his farm, with silver-mounted Mexican saddles and packsaddles for the mules. You will set out at dusk. It will take you three hours or so to deliver the presents; then you will return here and hand back the animals to Don Alfredo's foreman and hang away your robes. Understood?"

"Understood, Father," replied Eduardo when neither Ramoncito nor Lazaro spoke. He did not ask for leadership. It annoyed him, actually. But it was always thrust on him.

"Now go along to your homes," concluded the old priest, "and do not reveal to anyone that you are the Three Kings, We would not wish to sadden the hearts of any of the little ones."

During the next couple of days, as they discussed the roles they were to play, Ramoncito grew somewhat bitter about the "little ones." "What do we care if they find out the Kings aren't real?" he exclaimed resentfully. "We found out."

"That's no way to talk," replied Eduardo brusquely in his deep voice. "Before we knew the Kings did not exist, we thought they were marvels. We nearly went out of our heads waiting for them to come to our houses and bang the knockers. True?"

Fat little Lazaro offered no opinion one way or the other. Instead, he made a street map and planned the route they would take, so that they would be able to visit the houses on their list with the least possible amount of backtracking. Lazaro was efficient. Either that or he was lazy. Or it may be that efficiency and laziness are merely different names for the same thing.

With the school empty for the holidays, the playground seemed strange to the boys when they met there late on the afternoon of the fifth, a lonely square of red, grainy earth over which dry leaves skated. Land crabs had dug comfortable homes for themselves in the basketball court.

They loaded the four pack mules one at a time, with Eduardo carrying out the heavier toys the tricycles and the miniature automobiles because he was the strongest, Lazaro arranging the boxes and parcels in accordance with his map and Ramoncito, who was a passionate fisherman and good at tying knots, filling the large burlap sacks that would serve as their saddlebags and lashing them to the mahogany packsaddles. The mules, more intelligent than the horses, understood at once that they were being invited to join in some kind of game. They behaved well, neither balking nor biting. With the mules loaded, the boys saddled the three small, beautiful mares, who would have looked to an American as if they had pranced right off a merry-go-round. Then the boys put on their costumes.

The school had had the costumes for so many years that nobody remembered any longer who had made them originally somebody's mother, probably. Whoever she was, she had used the same rich materials she would have used in embroidering an altar cloth for the church. Ed-uardo's robe was of turquoise satin belted with a gold cord and on his head he wore a multicolored turban. Lazaro's robe was of heavy silver brocade and his turban was of purple velvet. Ramoncito wore a mandarinlike coat of blue silk, ornately embroidered, and a wine-colored turban. They wore their ordinary shoes, because the belled Mexican stirrups would hide them when they were on horseback and the long robes would cover them when they got down to enter the houses. Last of all, they attached their long white beards with liquid adhesive and, using an eyebrow pencil, drew the wrinkles of old age on their brown young faces.

Then, the horses ready, the mules waiting eagerly in single file on their lead ropes, the boys watched the sun go down behind the palm groves to the west. It sank, a giant illuminated peach sending up a spray of golden searchlights through the massed clouds. After it was below the horizon, the sky was filled with dazzling lime-green light, and then, with no interval, it was dusk. It had been a fruit punch of a sunset, complete with maraschino cherries and lemon sherbet, but the boys had seen it every night of their lives, and they supposed that the sun behaved as extravagantly in all countries. To them it was merely a signal that the time had come for them to start.

"Mount," ordered Eduardo, and they swung themselves into the highbacked, embossed saddles. The lead mule brayed gaily in a spirit of adventure. Off they trotted.

"The top end of Princess Street," directed Lazaro. "The Montoros live there at Number 17."

"I believe thee," replied Ramoncito, whose secret intention it was one day to marry the middle Montoro girl, Gladys.

The houses of Cardenas, like the houses in most Latin cities, are invisible. That is, you see nothing of them from the street except the front wall, which joins the front walls of the residences on either side and is plastered over with the same golden stucco. Inside the wall, from front to back, each house is divided into two long, narrow strips, side by side. One of these strips, which has no roof over it, is a tiled garden with a fountain, stone flower boxes, lime and mango and papaya trees and an array of outdoor furniture. Here the family lives three hundred days in the year. The long strip on the other side, roofed over with faded vermilion tiles, contains the formal living room with its crystal chandelier and cumbersome mahogany furniture; the bedrooms, each of which has its own door opening into the garden; the dining room, with another chandelier and a big electric refrigerator from the United States standing in a corner; and the kitchen, where the food is cooked over square cast-iron baskets of fragrant, glowing charcoal. Behind the kitchen live the servants, and all their relatives who are able to think up convincing hard-luck stories.

But there is something about the houses of Cardenas that is stranger still, and this is that the richest man in the block may live next door to the poorest. There are poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods, but often a banker lives in the poor one and a shrimp peddler in the rich one. For this reason, as the boys dismounted at the Montoro house the could not help but see the nine barefoot children of Emil-io, the shoemaker, dressed in ragged shirts and nothing else, who stared at them hopefully as they took down the saddlebag containing the Montoro youngsters' gifts. Eduardo, whose voice was already so much deeper than many a man's, thudded on the door with the brass knocker and bellowed: "Do the good young ones of the Senores Montoro live here?"

Senor Montoro swung open the tall door, elegant in his starched white jacket of pleated linen. "Yes, sir, we have good young ones in this house," he replied. "May I ask who you are, gentlemen?"

"We are the Three Kings of Orient," boomed Eduardo.

"Enter, then. This is thy house."

The Montoro children, jabbering with excitement, accepted the presents that had their names on them as Eduardo and Ramoncito took them from the opened burlap sack. Hasty goodbyes were said, the Kings explaining that they had a great distance to travel before morning, and they mounted and rode on.

"The shoemaker's kids are all crying," said Lazaro over the clip-clop of the hooves. "I can hear them. They thought we'd leave something for them when we came out of the Montoros'."

"Maybe Jaime Montoro will give them his express wagon after he smashes it," said Ramoncito. "I'll bet there won't be a wheel left by noon tomorrow."

At the Cabrera house on Shell Street they delivered a fifty-dollar French doll to Myriam Cabrera, along with a dozen other packages. Mounting again, they turned into Anglona Street. By now it was dark, the only light on the street falling from unshaded bulbs at the intersections. They were conscious as they rode along of people, grownups as well as children, watching them from the sidewalks. Everybody was out for an evening stroll in the cool bay breeze. Now and again somebody called out "Look, the Three Kings!" and each time the voice was thrilled and reverent. There was mystery in the night. The mules felt it, pricking up their ears, and the horses, catching the mur-m is of admiration tossed their manes and lifted their forefeet higher than they really needed to, showing off. A group of men around the white pushcart of a tamalero cheered and waved. One of them, a farmer in high-laced boots with his sugarcane knife at his belt, ran into the street and tried to feed his tamale to Eduardo's horse.

On Saint John of God Street the horses shied at the peanut seller who was chanting, "Peanuts a little hot, peanuts a little hot," and again there were watchers in the darkness under the rustling palms. Distinctly the boys heard a little girl ask in a trembling voice: "Mama, will they come to us?" And they heard the mother's patient, desperate answer: "Who knows, soul of my soul? But if they do not come tonight you must be valiant, for surely they will come next year."

On the lead mare Eduardo, who knew a number of words which did not meet with Father Miguel's approval, muttered a particularly bad one.

"Now she's crying," exclaimed Lazaro, "because we've passed her house."

"If you think this is bad," said Ramoncito, "wait till we get down by the market. My brother Pepe told me when he was a King he rode through four blocks of bawling beggar kids there."

"The poor are always with us," replied Ed-uardo gruffly. "Jesus says so in the Bible."

"He means they are always with us to remind us to do something about them, Elephant," said Lazaro. "That's what He means."

"What do you want?" Eduardo shouted back. "Am I to blame because there are families that can't earn a living? The cane crop is poor this year."

Eduardo's anger was something to be quenched promptly; it was well known. "No, Elephant, dear, you are not to blame," said Ramoncito. "We don't say you are."

"Then shut up, the two of you!"

"I just think," said Lazaro in the clear, sweet voice that permitted him, at fifteen, still to sing in the choir, "it's a shame to take gifts to rich kids like us when it's the poor kids that need them."

"Me, too. My father is giving me a bicycle," added Ramoncito. "What do I want with a domino set and a silly card game that's supposed to teach me how to spell?"

"Father Miguel told us what to do," said Eduardo grimly, "and we're going to do it."

But not a hundred yards farther on a small boy of seven or eight, in a shirt made of secondhand cheesecloth washed white for the holiday, ran hysterically into the street crying, "Oh, Kings, Kings! We live here, senores, at Number 22!"

Eduardo reined in so sharply that he hurt his mare's dainty mouth. Leaning down from his saddle, he bellowed in a voice that frightened the boy nearly out of his senses: "What's your name? Is there light in your house so we can see? Then take us there. Monkey, gallop back and get that girl that was howling!"

In the one-room house at Number 22, where an entire family slept on the clay floor and the only light was that from the candle blinking in its ruby cup at the feet of the Virgin, they handed out half a dozen packages, Eduardo glowering, Ramoncito scared but resolute, and Lazaro struggling to control the giggle that always assailed him at the wrong moment. The gratitude of the little boy and girl embarrassed them so terribly that they got away quickly, shutting the rickety door behind them with a slam. They gathered around the horses.

"Well, anyhow," said Eduardo, "those two won't bawl all night. But now what? You know we ought to obey the father."

"Tu eves jefe," answered Ramoncito with a shrug. "You're the boss."

"I'm not the boss," roared Eduardo. "You always make me the boss, and then I get into trouble. Do you realize the scandal it will be if we go down to the market and give all this stuff to the beggar kids?"

"Clearly it will be a scandal," responded Ramoncito. "It has never been done."

"We're wearing eleven-yard shirts now," protested Eduardo as we might say: "We're in hot water now." He turned to Lazaro. "What do you say, Macaroon?"

When a person of Spanish blood does not know what other answer to give, he answers with a proverb. "That which does not kill us," quoted Lazaro, "will make us fat." The saying did not fit the situation especially well, but it conveyed his meaning.

"All right," said Eduardo, "but you're both in this with me. Don't you forget it, either!"

"For an elephant," said Ramoncito, "you do a lot of talking."

Dramatically Lazaro crumpled his map and flung it into the gutter. They turned the horses' heads and trotted toward the market. In the street approaching it, Colonel Hangman Street, with its reek of fish heads and rotten cabbage, they drew rein. Somebody had smashed the street light with a cabbage or a pebble from a slingshot, but there was light enough from the stars to see by; the stars hung just over the rooftops like green and red Christmas tree ornaments lowered from Heaven on wires. Eduardo stood erect in his stirrups. "Hear me," he shouted. "Is this the town of Cardenas, in Cuba?" That was a fine imaginative touch. "Are there good young ones on this street who have behaved well this year? If there are, come you all to the market!"

The market, a maze of heavy stone archways, was brilliantly lighted. Curious, laughing butchers and vegetable sellers at once gathered a-round the Three Kings as they entered, dragging their bulky saddlebags. Even as the crowd formed a ring, dirty, barefoot children with uncombed hair and noses that badly needed wiping were pushing and wriggling and, where it was necessary, kicking their way to its center. Recklessly Eduardo, Ramoncito and Lazaro tore away tissue paper and ribbons, so that they could see what the gifts were, and passed them out. Arguments broke out in the crowd, but not among the children. They snatched their dolls and painting sets, their toy fire engines and scooters and raced away shrieking, carrying the greatest news of their lives to brothers, sisters and deserving friends.

In twenty minutes the saddlebags were empty. Not an all-day sucker was left. Even Ra-moncito's white beard was gone, for it had fallen to the concrete floor and a youngster had snatched it in the belief that it was a toy. Streaming perspiration, and as hoarse as crows, the three boys thrust their way through the chattering, mystified, admiring crowd that jammed the sidewalk for a block, mounted and trotted back to the school under the late moon. The moon could not manage anything quite as spectacular as the sun, but it was doing its best. It turned the massed clouds over the sea into great clusters of white camellias, wrapping each cluster in shining aluminum foil.

Scientists say nothing travels more swiftly than light. This is not true; in a small town good news, bad news, any kind of news at all travels faster. By the time the boys had hung up their costumes and turned over the animals to Don Alfredo's foreman, furious, gesticulating parents were already haranguing the boys' fathers. And by morning the anger had solidified into a demand that all three of them be expelled at once from school. The movement was headed by Triunfo Anilina, who had made a large fortune out of a small drugstore by selling medicines for much more than they were worth to people too sick to argue over price.

The druggist, sending around notes to everybody's house by messenger, demanded that all parents of boys attending the colegio meet there and put the matter to a vote at four o'clock.

At four that afternoon the outraged parents were at the school not two hours late, nor even one hour late, as was the custom, but on the dot. Plump fathers with cigars, plump mothers with small, exquisite feet in high-heeled, patent leather shoes, they followed Triunfo Anilina into the large, cool room in which arithmetic was taught. There they squeezed themselves into the seats behind the students' small desks while the burly druggist arrogantly preempted the mathematics teacher's desk on the dais. As for the boys themselves, without anybody's ordering them to do so, Eduardo, Ramoncito and Lazaro ranged themselves before the blackboard, standing with their backs to it. In their own minds they were guilty, convicted and ready for the firing squad.

"We are here," stated Triunfo Anilina curtly. "Let us begin."

He presented a detailed account o£ the crime that had been committed, using a number of large and impressive words he had picked up from his brother, a lawyer. It took him half an hour.

After this the fathers of the culprits spoke for the defense, Eduardo's father offering to repay the cost of all the gifts, Ramoncito's father pleading that boys would be boys, and Lazaro's father volunteering to pitch Triunfo and all the other male members of the Anilina family, to whom he referred as cockroaches, through the window.
But Triunfo Anilina shouted down the defense, pounding the desk with his hairy fist and upsetting the inkwell.

"The thieves must be punished!" he cried.

"Then the truth of the matter," said Eduardo's handsome father, getting once more to his feet, "is that nothing will satisfy you not honorable apology, not repayment, nothing. What you want is revenge."

"Yes, revenge!" gasped Triunfo Anilina, his linen jacket dark with perspiration. "What a scandal! It is the first time in the history of our colegio that this thing has happened!"

"Ah, Anilina," came a faint, musical buzz of a voice from the rear of the room, "you have a point there."

Every head turned as Father Miguel, pausing several times to gather strength along the way, came up the aisle in his long, tallow-colored gown. All the mothers and fathers had forgotten him.

Triunfo Anilina scrambled clumsily to his feet. "Take my seat. Father," he said.

"It is not your seat," replied Father Miguel. Standing on tlie dais, steadying himself with one small, dry hand on the edge of the desk, his bald skull reflecting the white light from the windows, he faced the parents. "Dear friends," he whispered, "it is so. For fifty years I have sent into the town, on the eve of Three Kings' Day, the three oldest boys of the school. And always they have distributed the gifts as I bade them, because they were good boys. Not until last night have they ever disobeyed me."

Behind the desk Triunfo Anilina jerked his head sharply in agreement.

"But these three boys are good boys also, since all boys are good boys," continued Father Miguel, "so, in fairness to them, we must examine their misdeed very closely. Exactly what, we must ask ourselves, did they do? They took rich gifts, provided by the bounty of our beloved island, and carried them to babes who sleep on straw pallets, if they are lucky enough to find any straw in the streets around the market. Does the straw remind you of anything, senores and senoras? It reminds me of another Babe, swaddled in coarse cloth, who slept on straw in a manger because there was no room for Him in an inn. And with this in mind it becomes clear beyond doubt that these are not good boys. No, they are something more than ordinary good boys. In the generosity of their hearts, the sweetness of their spirit, the courage of their will they are, indeed, Three Young Kings."
At the blackboard, arms stiff at his sides, Eduardo spoke out of the corner of his mouth to fat little Lazaro. "Giggle one time," he said, "and I advise thee that it will be thy last giggle."

In the schoolroom there was silence. Then Ramoncito's mother began to cry and Lazaro's father burst into boisterous laughter.

Father Miguel raised a hand.

"Now," he said, "if you will kindly help me to my house next door, a delegation from the neighborhood of the market is waiting. They wish to thank you for your sympathy and kindliness, which have so deeply touched them. They wish also to know the identities of the three noble Kings, in order that they may kiss their hands."

As Ye Sow By Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Casually, not that she was especially interested, just to say something, she asked as she handed out the four o'clock pieces of bread and peanut butter, "Well, what Christmas songs are you learning in your room this year?"

There was a moment's pause. Then the three little boys, her own and the usual two of his playmates, told her soberly, first one speaking, then another. "We're not going to be let to sing." "Teacher don't want us in the Christmas entertainment." Their round, eight-year-old faces were grave.

"Well !" said the mother. "For goodness' sakes, why not?"

Looking down at his feet, her own small David answered sadly, "Teacher says we can't sing good enough."

"Well enough," corrected his mother mechanically.

"Well enough," he repeated as mechanically.

One of the others said in a low tone, "She says we can't carry a tune. She's only going to let kids sing in the entertainment that can carry a tune."

David, still hanging his head humbly, murmured, "She says we'd spoil the piece our class is going to sing."

Inwardly the mother broke into a mother's rage at a teacher. "So that's what she says, does she? What's she for, anyhow, if not to teach children what they don't know. The idea! As if she'd say she would teach arithmetic only to those who are good at it already."

The downcast children stood silent. She yearned over their shame at failing to come up to the standards of their group. "Teachers are callous, that's what they are, insensitively callous. She is deliberately planting an inferiority feeling in them. It's a shame to keep them from going up on the platform and standing in the footlights. Not to let them have their share of being applauded! It's cruel."

She drew in a deep breath, and put the loaf of bread away. Then she said quietly, "Well, lots of kids your age can't carry a tune. Not till they've learned. How'd you like to practice your song with me? I could play the air on the piano afternoons, after school. You'd get the hang of it that way."

They brightened, they bit off great chunks of their snacks, and said, thickly, that that would be swell. They did not say they would be grateful to her, or regretted being a bother to her, busy as she always was. She did not expect them to. In fact it would have startled her if they had. She was the mother of four.

So while the after-school bread-and-butter was being eaten, washed down with gulps of milk, while the November-muddy rubbers were taken off, the mother pushed to the back of the stove the interrupted rice pudding, washed her hands at the sink, looked into the dining room where her youngest, Janey, was waking her dolls up from naps taken in the dining-room chairs, and took off her apron. Together the four went into the living room to the piano.

"What song is it, your room is to sing?"

"It came upon the midnight " said the three little boys, speaking at once.

"That's a nice one," she commented, reaching for the battered songbook on top of the piano. "This is the way it goes." She played the air, and sang the first two lines. "That'll be enough to start on," she told them. "Now " she gave them the signal to start.

They started. She had given them food for body and heart. Refreshed, heartened, with unquestioning confidence in a grown-up's ability to achieve whatever she planned, they opened their mouths happily and sang out.

"It came upon the midnight clear That glorious song of old."

They had evidently learned the words by heart from hearing them.

At the end of that phrase she stopped abruptly, and for an instant bowed her head over the keys. Her feeling about Teacher made a rightabout turn. There was a pause.

But she was a mother, not a teacher. She lifted her head, turned a smiling face on the three bellowing children. "I tell you what," she said. "The way, really, to learn a tune, is just one note after another. The reason why a teacher can't get everybody in her room up to singing in tune, is because she'd have to teach each person separately unless they happen to be naturally good at singing. That would take too much time, you see. A teacher has such a lot of children to see to."

They did not listen closely to this. They were not particularly interested in having justice done to Teacher, since they had not shared the mother's brief excursion into indignation. But they tolerated her with silent courtesy. They were used to parents, teachers, and other adults, and had learned how to take with patience and self-control their constantly recurring prosy explanations of things that did not matter.

"Listen," said the mother, "I'll strike just the two first notes on the piano 'It came ' " She struck the notes, she sang them clearly. Full of good will the little boys sang with her. She stopped. Breathed hard.

"Not quite," she said, with a false smile, "pret-t-ty good. Close to it. But not quite, yet. I think we'd better take it one note at a time. Bill, you try it."

They had been in and out of her house all their lives, they were all used to her, none of them had reached the age of self-consciousness. Without hesitation, Bill sang, "I-i-it " loudly.

After he had, the mother, as if fascinated, kept her eyes fixed on his still open mouth. Finally, "Try again," she said. "But first, listen." Oracularly she told them, "Half of carrying a tune is listening first."

She played the note again. And again. And again. Then, rather faintly, she said, "Peter, you sing it now."

At the note emitted by Peter, she let out her breath, as if she had been under water and just come up. "Fine!" she said. "Now we're getting somewhere! David, your turn." David was her own. "Just that one note. No, not quite. A little higher. Not quite so high." She was in a panic. What could she do? "Wait," she told David. "Try just breathing it out, not loud at all. Maybe you can get it better."

The boys had come in a little after four. It was five when the telephone rang Bill's mother asking her to send Bill home because his Aunt Emma was there. The mother turned from the telephone to say, "Don't you boys want to go along with Bill a ways, and play around for a while outdoors ? I've got to get supper ready." Cheerful, sure that she, like all adults, knew just what to do, relieved to see a door opening before them that had been slammed shut in their faces, and very tired of that one note, they put on their muddy rubbers and thudded out.

That evening when she told Her husband about it, after the children had gone to bed, she ended her story with a vehement "You never heard anything like it in your life, Harry, Never. It was appalling! You can't imagine what it was!"

"Oh, yes I can too," he said over his temporarily lowered newspaper. "I've heard plenty of tone-deaf kids hollering. I know what they sound like. There are people, you know, who really can't carry a tune. You probably never could teach them. Why don't you give it up?"

Seeing, perhaps, in her face, the mulish mother-stubbornness, he said, with a little exasperation, "What's the use of trying to do what you can't do?"

That was reasonable, after all, thought the mother. Yes, that was the sensible thing to do. She would be sensible, for once, and give it up. With everything she had to do, she would just be reasonable and sensible about this.

So the next morning, when she was downtown doing her marketing, she turned in at the public library and asked for books about teaching music to children. Rather young children, about eight years old, she explained.

The librarian, enchanted with someone who did not ask for a light, easy-reading novel, brought her two books, which she took away with her.

At lunch she told her husband (There were just the two of them with little Janey; the older children had their lunch at school.), "Musical experts say there really is no such thing as a tone-deaf person. If anybody seems so, it is only because he has not had a chance to be carefully enough trained."

Her husband looked at her quickly. "Oh, all right," he said, "all right! Have it your own way." But he leaned to pat her hand. "You're swell," he told her. "I don't see how you ever keep it up as you do. Gosh, it's one o'clock already."

During the weeks between then and the Christmas entertainment, she saw no more than he how she could ever keep it up. The little boys had no difficulty in keeping it up. They had nothing else to do at four o'clock. They were in the indestructible age, between the frailness of infancy and the taut nervous tensions of adolescence. Wherever she led they followed her cheerfully. In that period of incessant pushing against barriers which did not give way, she was the one whose flag hung limp.

Assiduous reading of those two reference books on teaching music taught her that there were other approaches than a frontal attack on the tune they wanted to sing. She tried out ear-experiments with them, of which she would never have dreamed, without her library books. She discovered to her dismay that sure enough, just as the authors of the books said, the little boys were musically so far below scratch that, without seeing which piano keys she struck, they had no idea whether a note was higher or lower than the one before it. She adapted and invented musical "games" to train their ear for this. The boys standing in a row, their backs to the piano, listening to hear whether the second note was "up hill or down hill" from the first note, thought it as good a game as any other, rather funnier than most because so new to them. They laughed raucously over each other's mistakes, kidded and joshed each other, ran a contest to see who came out best, while the mother, aprons  for cooking, her eye on the clock, got up and down for hurried forays into the kitchen where she was trying to get supper.

David's older brother and sister had naturally good ears for music. That was one reason why the mother had not dreamed that David had none. When the two older children came in from school, they listened incredulously, laughed scoffingly, and went off to skate, or to rehearse a play. Little Janey, absorbed in her family of dolls, paid no attention to these male creatures of an age so far from hers that they were as negligible as grown-ups. The mother toiled alone, in a vacuum, with nobody's sympathy to help her, her great stone rolling down hill as fast as she toilsome pushed it up.

Not quite in a vacuum. Not even in a vacuum. Occasionally the others made a comment, "Gee, Mom, those kids are fierce. You can't do anything with them." "Say, Helen, an insurance man is coming to the house this afternoon. For heaven's sake keep those boys from screeching while he is here. A person can't hear himself think."

So, she thought, with silent resentment, her task was not only to give up her own work, to invent and adapt methods of instruction in an hour she could not spare, but also to avoid bothering the rest. After all, the home was for the whole family. They had the right to have it the background of what they wanted to do, needed to do. Only not she. Not the mother, Of course.

She faltered. Many times. She saw the ironing heaped high, or Janey was in bed with a cold, and as four o'clock drew near, she said to herself, "Now today I'll just tell the boys that I can not go on with this. We're not getting anywhere, anyhow."

So when they came storming in, hungry and cheerful and full of unquestioning certainty that she would not close that door she had half-opened for them, she laid everything aside and went to the piano.

As a matter of fact, they were getting somewhere. She had been so beaten down that she was genuinely surprised at the success of the exercises ingeniously devised by the authors of those books. Even with their backs to the piano, the boys could now tell, infallibly, whether a second note was above or below the first one. Sure. They even thought it distinctly queer that they had not been able to, at first. "Never paid any attention to it, before," was their own accurate surmise as to the reason.

They paid attention now, their interest aroused by their first success, by the incessant practicing of the others in their classroom, by the Christmas-entertainment thrill which filled the schoolhouse with suspense. Although they were allowed no part in it, they also paid close attention to the drill given the others, and sitting in their seats, exiled from the happy throng of singers, they watched how to march along the aisle of the Assembly Hall, decorously, not too fast, not too slow, and when the great moment came for climbing to the platform how not to knock their toes against the steps. They fully expected wasn't a grown-up teaching them? to climb those steps to the platform with the others, come the evening of the entertainment.

It was now not on the clock that the mother kept her eye during those daily sessions at the piano, it was on the calendar. She nervously intensified her drill, but she remembered carefully not to yell at them when they went wrong, not to screw her face into the grimace which she felt, not to clap her hands over her ears and scream, "Oh, horrible! Why can't you get it right!" She reminded herself that if they knew how to get it right, they would of course sing it that way. She knew (she had been a mother for sixteen years) that she must keep them cheerful and hopeful, or the tenuous thread of their interest and attention would snap. She smiled. She did not allow herself even once to assume the blighting look of patience.

Just in time, along about the second week of December, they did begin to get somewhere. They could all sound if they remembered to sing softly and to "listen to themselves" a note, any note, within their range, she struck on the piano. Little Peter turned out, to his surprise and hers, to have a sweet clear soprano. The others were well, all right, good enough.

They started again, very cautiously, to sing that tune, to begin with "It ca-ame " having drawn a deep breath, and letting it out carefully. It was right- They were singing true.

She clapped her hands like a girl. They did not share her overjoyed surprise. That was where they had been going all the time. They had got there, that was all. What was there to be surprised about?

After that it went fast; the practicing of the air, their repeating it for the first skeptical, and then thoroughly astonished Teacher, their triumphant report at home, "She says we can sing it good enough. She says we can sing with the others. We practiced going up on the platform this afternoon."

Then the Christmas entertainment. The tramping of class after class up the aisle to the moment of foot-lighted glory; the big eighth graders' Christmas pantomime, the first graders' wavering performance of a Christmas dance as fairies or were they snowflakes? Or perhaps angels? It was not clear. They were tremendously applauded, whatever they were. The swelling hearts of their parents burst into wild hand-clapping as the first grade began to file down the steps from the platform. Little Janey, sitting on her mother's lap, beat her hands together too, excited by the thought that next year she would be draped in white cheesecloth, would wear a tinsel crown and wave a star-tipped wand.

Then it was the turn of the third grade, the eight- and nine-year-olds, the boys clumping up the aisle, the girls switching their short skirts proudly. The careful tiptoeing up the steps to the platform, remembering not to knock their toes on the stair-treads, the two lines of round faces facing the audience, bland and blank in their ignorance of oh, of everything! thought David's mother, her hand clutching her handbag tensely.

The crash from the piano giving them the tone, all the mouths open,

"It came upo-on the midnight clear That glorious song of old."

The thin pregnant woman sitting in front of the mother, leaned to the shabbily dressed man next to her, with a long breath of relief. "They do real good, don't they?" she whispered proudly.

They did do real good. Teacher's long drill and hers had been successful. It was not howling, it was singing. It had cost the heart's blood, thought the mother, of two women, but it was singing. It would never again be howling, not from those children.

It was even singing with expression some. There were swelling crescendos, and at the lines "The world in solemn stillness lay To hear the angels sing." the child-voices were hushed in a diminuendo. Part of the mother's very life had been spent in securing her part of that diminuendo. She ached at the thought of the effort that had gone into teaching that hushed tone, of the patience and self-control and endlessly repeated persistence in molding into something shapely the boys' puppy-like inability to think of anything but aimless play. It had taken hours out of her life, crammed as it was far beyond what was possible with work that must be done. Done for other people. Not for her. Not for the mother. This had been one of the things that must be done. And she had done it. There he stood, her little David, a fully accredited part of his corner of society, as good as anybody, the threat of the inferiority-feeling averted for this time, ready to face the future with enough self-confidence to cope with what would come next. The door had been slammed in his face. She had pushed it open, and he had gone through.

The hymn ended. The burst of parental applause began clamorously. Little Janey, carried away by the festival excitement, clapped with all her might "learning the customs of her corner of society," thought her mother, smiling tenderly at the petal-soft noiselessness of the tiny hands.

The third grade filed down the steps from the platform and began to march back along the aisle. For a moment, the mother forgot that she was no longer a girl, who expected recognition when she had done something creditable. David's class clumped down the aisle. Surely, she thought, David would turn his head to where she sat and thank her with a look. Just this once.

He did turn his head as he filed by. He looked full at his family, at his father, his mother, his kid sister, his big brother and sister from high school. He gave them a formal, small nod to show that he knew they were there, to acknowledge publicly that they were his family. He even smiled, a very little, stiffly, fleetingly. But his look was not for her. It was just as much for those of his family who had been bored and impatient spectators of her struggle to help him, as for her who had given part of her life to roll that stone up hill, a part of her life she never could get back.

She shifted Janey's weight a little on her knees. Of course. Did mothers ever expect to be thanked? They were to accept what they received, without bitterness, without resentment. After all, that was what mothers worked for not for thanks, but to do their job. The sharp chisel of life, driven home by experience, flaked off expertly another flint-hard chip from her blithe, selfish girlhood. It fell away from the woman she was growing to be, and dropped soundlessly into the abyss of time.

After all, she thought, hearing vaguely the seventh-graders now on the platform (none of her four was in the seventh grade), David was only eight. At that age they were, in personality, completely cocoons, as in their babyhood they had been physical cocoons. The time had not come yet for the inner spirit to stir, to waken, to give a sign that it lived.

It certainly did not stir in young David that winter. There was no sign that it lived. The snowy weeks came and went. He rose, ravenously hungry, ate an enormous breakfast with the family, and clumped off to school with his own third-graders. The usual three stormed back after school, flinging around a cloud of overshoes, caps, mittens, windbreakers. For their own good, for the sake of their wives-to-be, for the sake of the homes which would be dependent on them, they must be called back with the hard-won, equable reasonableness of the mother, and reminded to pick up and put away. David's special two friends came to his house at four to eat her cookies, or went to each other's houses to eat other cookies. They giggled, laughed raucously, kidded and joshed each other, pushed each other around. They made snow-forts in their front yards, they skated with awkward energy on the place where the brook overflowed the meadow, took their sleds out to Hingham Hill for coasting, made plans for a shack in the woods next summer.

In the evening, if the homework had been finished in time, they were allowed to visit each other for an hour, to make things with Meccano, things which were a source of enormous pride to the eight-year-olds, things which the next morning fell over, at the lightest touch of the mother's broom.

At that age, thought the mother, their souls, if any, were certainly no more than seeds, deep inside their hard, muscular, little-boy flesh. How do souls develop, she wondered occasionally, as she washed dishes, made beds, selected carrots at the market, answered the telephone. How do souls develop out of those rough-and-ready little males? If they do develop?

David and Peter, living close to each other, shared the evening play-hour more often than the third boy who lived across the tracks. They were allowed to go by themselves, to each other's house, even though it was winter-black at seven o'clock. Peter lived on the street above theirs, up the hill. There was a short-cut down across a vacant lot, which was in sight of one or the other house, all the way. It was safe enough, even for youngsters, even at night. The little boys loved that downhill short-cut. Its steep slope invited their feet to fury. Never using the path, they raced down in a spray of snow kicked up by their flying overshoes, arriving at the house, their cheeks flaming, flinging themselves like cannonballs  against the kitchen door, tasting a little the heady physical fascination of speed, on which later, as ski-runners, they would become wildly drunken.

"Sh! David! Not so loud!" his mother often said, springing up from her mending at the crash of the banged-open door. "Father's trying to do some accounts," or "Sister has company in the living room."

Incessant acrobatic feat to keep five people of different ages and personalities, all living under the same roof, from stepping on each other's feet. Talk about keeping five balls in the air at the same time! That was nothing compared to keeping five people satisfied to live with each other, to provide each one with approximately what he needed and wanted without taking away something needed by one of the others. (Arithmetically considered, there were of course six people living under that roof. But she did not count. She was the mother. She took what she got, what was left. . . .)

That winter, as the orbits of the older children lay more outside the house, she found herself acquiring a new psychological skill that was almost eerie. She could be in places where she was not, at all. She had an astral body which could go anywhere. Anywhere, that is, where one of her five was, She was with her honey-sweet big daughter in the living room, playing games with high-school friends (was there butter enough, she suddenly asked herself, for the popcorn the young people would inevitably want, later?). She was upstairs where her husband sat, leaning over the desk, frowning in attentiveness at a page of figures that desk-light was not strong enough. Better put the flood-light up there tomorrow. She was in the sun-porch of the neighbor's house, where her little son was bolting Meccano-strips together with his square, strong, not-very-clean hands his soul, if any, dormant far within his sturdy body. She floated above the scrimmage in the high-school gym, where her firstborn played basketball with ferocity, pouring out through that channel the rage of maleness constantly gathering in his big frame which grew that year with such fantastic rapidity that he seemed taller at breakfast than he had been when he went to bed. She sent her astral body upstairs to where her little daughter, her baby, her darling, slept with one doll in her arms, and three others on the pillow beside her. That blanket was not warm enough for Janey. When she went to bed, she would put on another one.

She was all of them. First one, then another. When was she herself? When did her soul have time to stretch its wings?

One evening this question tried to push itself into her mind, but was swept aside by her suddenly knowing, as definitely as if she had heard a clock strike, or the doorbell ring , that the time had passed for David's return from his evening play-hour with Peter. She looked at her watch. But she did not need to. A sixth sense told her heart, as with a blow, that he should before this have come pelting down the hill, plowing the deep snow aside in clouds, hurling himself against the kitchen door. He was late. Her astral self, annihilating time and space, fled out to look for him. He must have left the other house some time ago. Peter's mother always sent him home promptly.

She laid down the stocking she was darning, stepped into the dark kitchen, and put her face close to the window to look out. It was a cloudless cold night. Every detail of the backyard world was visible, almost transparent, in the pale radiance that fell from the stars. Not a breath of wind. She could see everything: the garbage pail at the woodshed door, the trampled snow of the driveway, the clothes she had washed that morning and left on the line, the deep unbroken snow beyond the yard, the path leading up the hill.

Then she saw David. He was standing half way down, as still as the frozen night around him.

But David never stood still.

Knee-deep in the snow he stood, looking all around him. She saw him slowly turn his head to one side, to the other. He lifted his face toward the sky. It was almost frightening to see David stand so still. What could he be looking at? What was there he could be seeing? Or hearing? For as she watched him, the notion crossed her mind that he seemed to be listening. But there was nothing to hear. Nothing.

She did not know what was happening to her little son. Nor what to do. So she did nothing. She stood as still as he, her face at the window, lost in wonder.

She saw him, finally, stir and start slowly, slowly down the path. But David never moved slowly. Had he perhaps had a quarrel with Peter? Had Peter's mother been unkind to him?

It could do no harm now to go to meet him, she thought, and by that time, she could not, anxious as she was, not go to meet him. She opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the dark, under the stars.

He saw her, he came quickly to her, he put his arms around her waist. With every fiber of her body which had borne his, she felt a difference in him.

She did not know what to say, so she said nothing.
It was her son who spoke. "It's so still," he said quietly in a hushed voice, a voice she had never heard before. "It's so still!"

He pressed his cheek against her breast as he tipped his head back to look up. "All those stars," he murmured dreamily, "they shine so. But they don't make a sound. They they're nice, aren't they?"

He stood a little away from her to look up into her face. "Do you remember in the song 'the world in solemn stillness lay'?" he asked her, but he knew she remembered.

The starlight showed him clear, his honest, little-boy eyes wide, fixed trustingly on his mother's. He was deeply moved. But calm. This had come to him while he was still so young that he could be calmed by his mother's being with him. He had not known that he had an inner sanctuary. Now he stood in it, awe-struck at his first sight of beauty. And opened the door to his mother.

As naturally as he breathed, he put into his mother's hands the pure rounded pearl of a shared joy. "I thought I heard them singing sort of," he told her.

The Festival Of Saint Nicholas By Mary Mapes Dodge

We all know how, before the Christmas tree began to flourish in the home life of our country, a certain "right jolly old elf," with "eight tiny reindeer," used to drive his sleigh-load of toys up to our housetops, and then bound down the chimney to fill the stockings so hopefully hung by the fireplace. His friends called him Santa Claus; and those who were most intimate ventured to say, "Old Nick." It was said that he originally came from Holland. Doubtless he did; but, if so, he certainly, like many other foreigners, changed his ways very much after landing upon our shores. In Holland, Saint Nicholas is a veritable saint, and often appears in full costume, with his embroidered robes glittering with gems and gold, his mitre, his crosier, and his jewelled gloves. Here Santa Claus comes rollicking along on the 25th of December, our holy Christmas morn; but in Holland, Saint Nicholas visits earth on the 5th, a time especially appropriated to him. Early on the morning of the 6th, he distributes his candies, toys, and treasures, and then vanishes for a year.

Christmas Day is devoted by the Hollanders to church-rites and pleasant family visiting. It is on Saint Nicholas Eve that their young people become half wild with joy and expectation. To some of them it is a sorry time; for the saint is very candid, and, if any of them have been bad during the past year, he is quite sure to tell them so. Sometimes he carries a birch-rod under his arm, and advises the parents to give them scolding in place of confections, and floggings instead of toys.

It was well that the boys hastened to their abodes on that bright winter evening; for, in less than an hour afterwards, the saint made his appearance in half the homes of Holland. He visited the king's palace, and in the selfsame moment appeared in Annie Bouman's comfortable home. Probably one of our silver half-dollars would have purchased all that his saint-ship left at the peasant Bouman's. But a half-dollar's worth will sometimes do for the poor what hundreds of dollars may fail to do for the rich: it makes them happy and grateful, fills them with new peace and love.

Hilda van Gleck's little brothers and sisters were in a high state of excitement that night. They had been admitted into the grand parlor: they were dressed in their best, and had been given two cakes apiece at supper. Hilda was as joyous as any. Why not? Saint Nicholas would never cross a girl of fourteen from his list, just because she was tall and looked almost like a woman. On the contrary, he would probably exert himself to do honor to such an august-looking damsel. Who could tell? So she sported and laughed and danced as gayly as the youngest, and was the soul of all their merry games. Father, mother, and grandmother looked on approvingly; so did grandfather, before he spread his large red handkerchief over his face, leaving only the top of his skullcap visible. This kerchief was his ensign of sleep.

Earlier in the evening, all had joined in the fun. In the general hilarity, there had seemed to be a difference only in bulk between grandfather and the baby. Indeed, a shade of solemn expectation, now and then flitting across the faces of the younger members, had made them seem rather more thoughtful than their elders.

Now the spirit of fun reigned supreme. The very flames danced and capered in the polished grate. A pair of prim candles, that had been staring at the astral lamp, began to wink at other candles far away in the mirrors. There was a long bell-rope suspended from the ceiling in the corner, made of glass beads, netted over a cord nearly as thick as your wrist. It generally hung in the shadow,'and made no sign; but tonight it twinkled from end to end. Its handle of crimson glass sent reckless dashes of red at the papered wall, turning its dainty blue stripes into purple. Passers-by halted to catch the merry laughter floating through curtain and sash into the street, then skipped on their way with the startled consciousness that the village was wide awake. At last matters grew so uproarious that the grandsire's red kerchief came down from his face with a jerk. What decent old gentleman could sleep in such a racket! Mynheer van Gleck regarded his children with astonishment. The baby even showed symptoms of hysterics. It was high time to attend to business. Madame suggested that, if they wished to see the good Saint Nicholas, they should sing the same loving invitation that had brought him the year before.

The baby stared, and thrust his fist into his mouth, as Mynheer put him down upon the floor. Soon he sat erect, and looked with a sweet scowl at the company. With his lace and embroideries, and his crown of blue ribbon and whalebone (for he was not quite past the tumbling age), he looked like the king of the babies.

The other children, each holding a pretty willow basket, formed at once in a ring, and moved slowly around the little fellow, lifting their eyes meanwhile; for the saint to whom they were about to address themselves was yet in mysterious quarters.

Madame commenced playing softly upon the piano; soon the voices rose gentle, youthful voices, rendered all the sweeter for their tremor

"Welcome, friend! Saint Nicholas, welcome!

Bring no rod for us tonight! While our voices bid thee welcome,

Every heart with joy is light.

"Tell us every fault and failing; We will hear thy keenest railing So we sing, so we sing: Thou shalt tell us everything!

"Welcome, friend! Saint Nicholas, welcome!

Welcome to this merry bandl Happy children greet thee, welcome!

Thou are gladdening all the land.

"Fill each empty hand and basket; Tis thy little ones who ask it. So we sing, so we sing: Thou wilt bring us everything!"

During the chorus, sundry glances, half in eagerness, half in dread, had been cast towards the polished folding-doors. Now a loud knocking was heard. The circle was broken in an instant. Some of the little ones, with a strange mixture of fear and delight, pressed against their mother's knee. Grandfather bent forward, with his chin resting upon his hand; grandmother lifted her spectacles; Mynheer van Gleck, seated by the fireplace, slowly drew his meerschaum from his mouth; while Hilda and the other children settled themselves beside him in an expectant group.

The knocking was heard again.

"Come in," said Madame, softly.

The door slowly opened; and Saint Nicholas, in full array, stood before them. You could have heard a pin drop. Soon he spoke. What a mysterious majesty in his voice! What kindliness in his tones!

"Karel van Gleck, I am pleased to greet thee, and thy honored vrouw, Kathrine, and thy son, and his good vrouw, Annie.

"Children, I greet ye all Hendrick, Hilda, Broom, Katy, Huygens, and Lucretia. And thy cousins Wolfert, Diedrich, Mayken, Voost, and Katrina. Good children ye have been, in the main, since I last accosted ye. Diedrich was rude at the Haarlem fair last fall; but he has tried to atone for it since. Mayken has failed, of late, in her lessons; and too many sweets and trifles have gone to her lips, and too few stivers to her charity-box. Diedrich, I trust, will be a polite, manly boy for the future; and Mayken will endeavor to shine as a student. Let her remember, too, that economy and thrift are needed in the foundation of a worthy and generous life. Little Katy has been cruel to the cat more than once. Saint Nicholas can hear the cat cry when its tail is pulled. I will forgive her, if she will remember from this hour that the smallest dumb creatures have feeling, and must not be abused."

As Katy burst into a frightened cry, the saint graciously remained silent until she was soothed.

"Master Broom," he resumed, "I warn thee that boys who are in the habit of putting snuff upon the foot-stove of the school-mistress may one day be discovered, and receive a flogging "

(Master Broom colored, and stared in great astonishment.)

"But, thou art such an excellent scholar, I shall make thee no further reproof.

"Thou, Hendrick, didst distinguish thyself in the archery match last Spring, and hit the bulls-eye, though the bird was swung before it to unsteady thine eye. I give thee credit for excelling in manly sport and exercise though I must not unduly countenance thy boat-racing since it leaves thee too little time for thy proper studies.

"Lucretia and Hilda shall have a blessed sleep tonight. The consciousness of kindness to the poor, devotion in their souls, and cheerful, hearty obedience to household rule will render them happy.

"With one and all I avow myself well content. Goodness, industry, benevolence and thrift have prevailed in your midst. Therefore, my blessing upon you and may the New Year find all treading the paths of obedience, wisdom and love. Tomorrow you shall find more substantial proofs that I have been in your midst. Farewell!"

With these words came a great shower of sugar-plums, upon a linen sheet spread out in front of the doors. A general scramble followed. The children fairly tumbled over each other in their eagerness to fill their baskets. Madame cautiously held the baby down in their midst, till the chubby little fists were filled. Then the bravest of the youngsters sprang up and burst open the closed doors in vain they peered into the mysterious apartment Saint Nicholas was nowhere to be seen.

Soon there was a general rush to another room, where stood a table, covered with the finest and whitest of linen damask. Each child, in a flutter of excitement, laid a shoe upon it. The door was then carefully locked, and its key hidden in the mother's bedroom. Next followed good-night kisses, a grand family-procession to the upper floor, merry farewells at bedroom doors and silence, at last, reigned in the Van Gleck mansion.

Early the next morning the door was solemnly unlocked and opened in the presence of the assembled household, when lo! a sight appeared proving Saint Nicholas to be a saint of his word!

Every shoe was filled to overflowing, and beside each stood many a colored pile. The table was heavy with its load of presents candies, toys, trinkets, books and other articles. Everyone had gifts, from grandfather down to the baby.

Little Katy clapped her hands with glee, and vowed, inwardly, that the cat should never know another moment's grief.

Hendrick capered about the room, flourishing a superb bow and arrows over his head. Hilda laughed with delight as she opened a crimson box and drew forth its glittering contents. The rest chuckled and said "Oh!" and "Ah!" over their treasures, very much as we did here in America on last Christmas day.

The Mouse That Didn't Believe In Santa Claus By Eugene Field

The clock stood, of course, in the corner; a moonbeam floated idly on the floor, and a little mauve mouse came from the hole in the chimney corner and frisked and scampered in the light of the moonbeam upon the floor. The little mauve mouse was particularly merry; sometimes she danced upon two legs and sometimes upon four legs, but always very daintily and always very merrily.

"Ah, me," sighed the old clock, "how different mice are nowadays from the mice we used to have in the old times! Now there was your grandma, Mistress Velvetpaw, and there was your grandpa, Master Sniff whisker how grave and dignified they were! Many a night have I seen them dancing upon the carpet below me, but always that stately minuet and never that crazy frisking which you are executing now, to my surprise yes, and to my horror, too!"

"But why shouldn't I be merry?" asked the little mauve mouse. "Tomorrow is Christmas, and this is Christmas Eve."

"So it is," said the old clock. "I had really forgotten all about it. But, tell me, what is Christmas to you, little Miss Mauve Mouse?"

"A great deal to me!" cried the little mauve mouse. "I have been very good for a very long time; I have not used any bad words, nor have I gnawed any holes, nor have I stolen any canary seed, nor have I worried my mother by running behind the flour barrel where that horrid trap is set. In fact, I have been so good that I'm very sure Santa Claus will bring me something very pretty."

This seemed to amuse the old clock mightily; in fact, the old clock fell to laughing so heartily that in an unguarded moment she struck twelve instead of ten, which was exceedingly careless.

"Why, you silly little mauve mouse," said the old clock, "you don't believe in Santa Claus, do you?"

"Of course I do," answered the mauve mouse. "Believe in Santa Claus? Why shouldn't I? Didn't Santa Claus bring me a beautiful butter cracker last Christmas, and a lovely gingersnap, and a delicious rind of cheese, and lots of things? I should be very ungrateful if I did not believe in Santa Claus, and I certainly shall not disbelieve in him at the very moment when 1 am expecting him to arrive with a bundle of goodies for me.

"I once had a little sister," continued the little mauve mouse, "who did not believe in Santa Claus, and the very thought of the fate that befell her makes my blood run cold and my whiskers stand on end. She died before I was born, but my mother has told me all about her. Her name was Squeak nibble, and she was in stature one of those long, low, rangy mice that are seldom found in well-stocked pantries. Mother says that Squeak nibble took after our ancestors who came from New England, and seemed to inherit many ancestral traits, the most conspicuous of which was a disposition to sneer at some of the most respected dogmas in mousedom. From her very infancy she doubted, for example, the widely accepted theory that the moon was composed of green cheese; and this heresy was the first intimation her parents had of her skeptical turn of mind. Of course, her parents were vastly annoyed, for they saw that this youthful skepticism would lead to serious, if not fatal, consequences. Yet all in vain did they reason and plead with their headstrong and heretical child.

"For a long time Squeak nibble would not believe that there was any such archfiend as a cat; but she came to be convinced one memorable night, on which occasion she lost two inches of her beautiful tail, and received so terrible a fright that for fully an hour afterward her little heart beat so violently as to lift her off her feet and bump her head against the top of our domestic hole. The cat that deprived my sister of so large a percentage of her tail was the same ogress that nowadays steals into this room, crouches treacherously behind the sofa, and feigns to be asleep, hoping, forsooth, that some of us, heedless of her hated presence, will venture within reach of her claws. So enraged was this ferocious monster at the escape of my sister that she ground her fangs viciously together, and vowed to take no pleasure in life until she held in her devouring jaws the innocent little mouse which belonged to the mangled bit of tail she even then clutched in her remorseless claws."

"Yes," said the old clock, "now that you recall the incident, I recollect it well. I was here then, and I remember that I laughed at the cat and chided her for her awkwardness. My reproaches irritated her; she told me that a clock's duty was to run itself down, not to be depreciating the merits of others! Yes, I recall the time; that cat's tongue is fully as sharp as her claws."

"Be that as it may," said the little mauve mouse, "it is a matter of history, and therefore beyond dispute, that from that very moment the cat pined for Squeak nibble’s life; it seemed as if that one little two-inch taste of Squeaknibble's tail had filled that cat with a consuming appetite for the rest of Squeak nibble. So the cat waited and watched and hunted and schemed and devised and did everything possible for a cat a cruel cat to do in order to gain her murderous ends.

"One night one fatal Christmas Eve our mother had undressed the children for bed, and was urging them all to go to sleep earlier than usual, since she fully expected that Santa Claus would bring each of them something very nice before morning. Thereupon the little dears whisked their cunning tails, pricked up their beautiful ears, and began telling one another what they hoped Santa Claus would bring. One asked for a slice of Roquefort, another for Swiss, another for Brick, and a fourth for Edam; one expressed a preference for Cream cheese, while another hoped for Camembert. There were fourteen little ones then, and consequently there were diverse opinions as to the kind of gift which Santa Claus should best bring; still there was, as you can readily understand, an enthusiastic agreement upon this point, namely, that the gift should be cheese of some brand or other.

" "My dears,' said our mother, 'we should be content with whatsoever Santa Claus bestows, so long as it is cheese, disjoined from all traps whatsoever, unmixed with Paris green, and free from glass, strychnine, and other harmful ingredients. As for myself, I shall be satisfied with a cut of nice, fresh American cheese. So run away to your dreams now, that Santa may find you sleeping.'

"The children obeyed all but Squeak nibble. 'Let the others think what they please,' said she, 'but I don't believe in Santa Claus. I'm not going to bed, either. I'm going to creep out of this dark hole and have a quiet romp, all by myself, in the moonlight.' Oh, what a vain, foolish, wicked little mouse was Squeak nibble! But I will not reproach the dead; her punishment came all too swiftly. Now listen: who do you suppose overheard her talking so disrespectfully of Santa Claus?"

"Why, Santa Claus himself," said the old clock.
 
"Oh, no," answered the little mauve mouse. "It was that wicked, murderous cat! Just as Satan lurks and lies in wait for bad children, so does the cruel cat lurk and lie in wait for naughty little mice. And you can depend upon it that, when that awful cat heard Squeak nibble speak so disrespectfully of Santa Claus, her wicked eyes glowed with joy, her sharp teeth watered, and her bristling fur emitted electric sparks as big as peas. Then what did that bloody monster do but scuttle as fast as she could into Dear-my-Soul's room, leap up into Dear-my-Soul's crib, and walk off with the pretty little white muff which Dear-my-Soul used to wear when she went for a visit to the little girl in the next block! What upon earth did the horrid old cat want with Dear-my-Soul's pretty little white muff? Ah, the ingenuity of that cat! Listen.

"In the first place," resumed the little mauve mouse, after a pause that showed the depth of her emotion, "in the first place, that wretched cat dressed herself up in that pretty little white muff, by which you are to understand that she crawled through the muff just so far as to leave her four cruel legs at liberty."

"Yes, I understand," said the old clock.

"Then she put on the boy doll's cap," said the little mauve mouse, "and when she was arrayed in the boy doll's fur cap and Dear-my-Soul's pretty little white muff, of course she didn't look like a cruel cat at all. But whom did she look like?"

"Like the boy doll," suggested the old clock.

"No, no!" cried the little mauve mouse.

"Like Dear-my-Soul?" asked the old clock.

"How stupid you are!" exclaimed the little mauve mouse. "Why, she looked like Santa Claus, of course!"

"Oh, yes; I see," said the old clock. "Now I begin to be interested; go on."

"Alas!" sighed the little mauve mouse, "not much remains to be told; but there is more of my story left than there was of Squeak nibble when that horrid cat crawled out of that miserable disguise. You are to understand that, contrary to her mother's warning, Squeak nibble issued from the friendly hole in the chimney corner, and gamboled about over this very carpet, and, I dare say, in this very moonlight.

"Right merrily was Squeak nibble gamboling," continued the little mauve mouse, "and she had just turned a double somersault without the use of what remained of her tail, when, all of a sudden, she beheld, looming up like a monster ghost, a figure all in white fur! Oh, how frightened she was, and how her little heart did beat! 'Purr, purr-r-r,' said the ghost in white fur. 'Oh, please don't hurt me!' pleaded Squeak nibble. 'No, I'll not hurt you/ said the ghost in white fur; 'I'm Santa Claus, and I've brought you a beautiful piece o£ savory old cheese, you dear little mousie, you.' Poor Squeak nibble was deceived; a sceptic all her life, she was at last befooled by the most fatal of frauds. 'How good of you!' said Squeak nibble. 'I didn't believe there was a Santa Claus, and ' but before she could say more she was seized by two sharp, cruel claws that conveyed her crushed body to the murderous mouth of the cat. I can dwell no longer upon this harrowing scene. Before the morrow's sun rose upon the spot where that tragedy had been enacted, poor Squeak nibble passed to that bourne to which two inches of her beautiful tail had preceded her by the space of three weeks to a day. As for Santa Claus, when he came that Christmas Eve, bringing cheese and goodies for the other little mice, he heard with sorrow of Squeak-nibble's fate; and ere he departed he said that in all his experience he had never known of a mouse or a child that had prospered after once saying he didn't believe in Santa Claus."

Do You Believe In Miracles? By Lois T. Henderson

The Reverend Paul Edwards stood at the back of the auditorium of the church and looked at the Christmas decorations. The decorating committee had just gone home, and he was alone in the dim sanctuary, alone with the glittering tree and the fragile silver star that hung above the altar.

But, for all the beauty, he was not stirred or moved, and a minister ought not to feel like that, he knew, not when he was only thirty and fairly new to the ministry. He ought to be filled with a fire. Especially when it was Christmas Eve.

But that was the whole trouble. He couldn't get excited about Christmas. He only knew he was tired and let down and maybe even a little disillusioned. He remembered Christmases when he was a theological student, and it had seemed as though all the air were filled with a sense of the miraculous. But now the air was just air, and misery engulfed him to think that it was so.

He sat in one of the pews and slid down on the end of his spine to stare at the artificial star against the darkened windows. That's just it, he thought, everything is artificial. The decorations, the very hearts of people. And mine too.

Suddenly he was frightened. He didn't want to feel the weariness, the artificiality. He wanted to feel as he had once felt, that miracles did happen on Christmas Eve, that animals could talk at midnight, that flowers did bloom out of the snow as gifts for the Christ child. He wanted the feeling so badly that it was like an aching in him.

I'll go home, he decided. Jeannie will cheer me up. He thought of his wife, small and merry and wise, and some of the panic dissolved in him. Jeannie will know what to say, he thought again, and pulled on his coat to go out into the night.

The darkness and the wind struck at him as he opened the church door. The snow drifted against his face to melt into little spots of wetness on his cheeks and lips. Boyishly, he stuck out his tongue to the snow, and it tasted cool and wet. The street lights made little pools of yellow in the dark, and the snow seemed to swirl in miniature whirlwinds under each light.

It looks like Christmas, he admitted to himself, but it doesn't feel like Christmas. And for a minister, it has to. It absolutely has to.

He walked swiftly to his house and came in out of the night and the cold to find light and fragrance and warmth. Jeannie met him in the hall, and her kiss was sweeter than usual.

"Cookie dough," she explained, and rubbed at her mouth.

Her eyes were soft and shining. She gets more beautiful every day, Paul felt, especially with the baby on the way. Her body was large and awkward with the weight of the child she carried but her face was tender and lovely.

As he looked at her standing there, he knew he couldn't tell her. Not on Christmas Eve. He couldn't tell her he was tired and frightened and not so sure of miracles any more. He couldn't transmit his fear to her. She believed in all the magic of Christmas you could see it in her eyes and he just couldn't spoil it for her.

So he attempted lightness instead. "How's the little mother?" he asked. "Not you. You're only making promises so far. I mean the real one."

Jeannie laughed with indulgent scorn. "That Hildy!" she said. "You'd think she was the only dog in all the world who ever had puppies. Honestly, she polishes them."

"It's her German heritage," Paul pronounced. "All dachshunds are abnormally clean."

"She's just fussy," Jeannie said, starting for the kitchen. "I hope I'll be a little more casual with our baby."

She leaned over heavily to take a tray of cookies from the oven.

"You're not baking cookies again?" he said. "Not at the last minute?"

She looked apologetic. "Not many. Just some gingerbread men. And these are the scraps. I remembered about six o'clock that I hadn't fixed a single thing for Penny Ellis, and I just had to do something."

Paul thought of Penny with sorrow. Poor little six-year-old Penny who had been desperately ill from polio in the summer and who was just now home from the hospital, facing the long difficult time of learning to walk again if she ever did.

"Maybe we could have bought her something," he said.

"No, she'll get plenty of dolls and fancy things. But I thought she'd love a gingerbread boy. With lots of icing."

"You!" he said. "You always think of the right things. Every single time."

"I did when I picked you," she said.

And he wondered what she would say if she knew of the thoughts that had tormented him lately. Not doubt it wasn't that. He still believed in God and in God's plan for him. It wasn't that at all. It was just that all the shine had worn off and he had begun to wonder if even the ministry, which he had thought would always be a thing of wonder and glory, had gotten drab and had lost much of its meaning. He wondered if cynicism, the greatest thief of all, had come into his life and heart.

"You take them over to her," Jeannie said, interrupting his thoughts. "She'll be extra thrilled if the minister comes on Christmas Eve."

"I don't think her Dad will be very thrilled," Paul said.

"Poor Guy," Jeannie murmured. "I feel so sorry for him."

"I feel sorrier for Penny," Paul said.

"No, because Penny still has faith in life. Guy doesn't. He's so bitter and resentful. Can't you help him, Paul?"

Paul's heart cried: How can I help him when I'm so mixed up myself! "I don't know," he answered guardedly. "He's pretty touchy right now, isn't much interested in preaching."

Jeannie laughed. "Oh, heavens, I don't mean preach at him. I mean just show him somehow, some way you'll know how, Paul that life is still wonderful. I think he thinks God has a special, personal grudge against him,"

"He isn't the only man whose child ever had to surfer," Paul said.

"But he feels Penny's suffering so intensely," Jeannie answered. "And I'm afraid his bitterness will hurt her. I'm afraid it'll break down her confidence. Aren't you?"
"Yes, I am," Paul admitted. "Well, I'll get along. Want to go along?"

"I'd love to, but I'm going to clean up the kitchen and then lie down on the couch for an hour or two so I'll be rested for the midnight service. This son of yours has been pretty active today," she said smugly.

"Daughter, you mean," Paul corrected her.

He took her in his arms. It seemed he had never loved her more than now. Her face still bore a faint trace of cookie dough, there was flour on her cheek, and her mouth looked tired. He held her gently, sensing the movements of their unborn child. Jeannie, he thought silently, pray for me, help me regain what I've lost.

"I love you," he said, kissing her.

"I love you too," she answered. "Come on now and take the cookies. I don't want you to be out too late."

He took the cookies wrapped in bright paper and went out again in the snow and the wind. In his present frame of mind, he really dreaded going to the Ellises'.

He loved Penny, and his heart ached for her, but it seemed to him that he almost bruised himself on the bitterness of Guy Ellis. It was really more than bitterness with Guy, Paul felt; it was lack of belief and faith and hope. It was a sullen sort of despair.

In a few minutes Paul knocked at the door of the Ellis home, and Nancy, Penny's mother, came to let him in.

"Why, Reverend Edwards," she cried. "How nice to see you. Guy, here's Reverend Edwards."

Guy Ellis came to greet the young minister, and his handclasp was cordial enough. Only his eyes showed the defeat and the despair.

"Merry Christmas," Paul said smiling. "I came to see Penny."

Nancy looked pleased. "She's not asleep yet. I was just going to read her a story. She'll be so tickled to see you."

Paul followed Nancy down the hall to the bedroom that had the high plain hospital bed in the center of it. Lying on the bed was a very thin little girl with quick-moving hands and too-still legs. Her light hair was pulled into braids, and her eyes were large from recent suffering.

"Reverend Edwards," she said, and the small pointed face grew bright. "I was just thinking about you."

"Were you?" Paul said. "And I was thinking about you."

"I'll let you talk to Penny," Nancy said, "and I'll go and tend to some secrets."

She winked at Paul and he marveled at her courage in the face of such odds,

"I'm glad she's gone," Penny confided as soon as her mother had left. "I was just layin' here wishin' you'd come, and you did. So now I know the other thing will happen, too."

Paul felt a faint prickle at the nape of his neck. "How just wishing I'd come?" he said cautiously.

Penny smiled. "I just said a while ago in a little whisper, you know, so nobody'd hear I just said, 'Dear God, please let Reverend Edwards come to see me 'cause I just have to tell somebody my secret.' And you came."

Paul's lips felt a little dry. Coincidence, said the cynical part of his heart, and he listened to it,

"So you have a secret?" he said and he tried to sound gay.

But she was very serious. "This is a very important secret," she said. "Very terrible important. I wasn't going to tell anybody. Just God, you know. But then I felt the secret would just bust out of me if I didn't tell someone."

She put her thin little hands on her chest as though the secret were lodged there.

"Then I thought about you," she went on, "and how well you know God, so I knew it would be all right to tell you."

Paul stared at the child. "How well I know God?" he asked, shaken.

She nodded. "You talk to Him in church like well, kind of like He lived next door to you."

Paul couldn't say anything. There were just no words to say to the child.

"The secret's something I asked God for," Penny said. "For Christmas. Lean down so I can whisper."
Paul felt an agony in him. She has asked God to make her walk, he thought. And she believes it will happen, like a miracle. And I can't stand to see her hurt.

"What did you ask for?" he whispered and bent close to her.

He was so amazed when her soft answer came that for a second he only looked at her blankly. "What?"

"A dog," she repeated. And Paul's heart soared. I have it in my power to work a miracle for her, he exulted to himself. I can bring over one of Hildy's pups and the prayer will be answered.

But then Penny went on solemnly, "A little gold-colored dog with long curly ears. And I'll call him Star. Wouldn't it be beautiful to get a real live golden Star on Christmas?"

Paul stared at the child, feeling utterly cast down. Hildy's pups would never do, for who could possibly explain to Penny that God could make a mistake and send a dark red-brown sleek little dachshund when a gold fluffy-eared cocker spaniel had been requested. No, I won't be able to work a miracle, after all, he thought. It was foolish to believe I could.

"Did you tell your Mommy?" he asked. "Or your Daddy?"

She shook her head against the pillow. "No, just God. And now you. But I know God will give me the dog."

There was such confidence and faith in her eyes that Paul thought he could not bear it. Because where would such a dog come from if her parents didn't know she wanted one? Why hadn't she written it in a letter to Santa like other kids did and then her father could have read the letter? Why had she prayed about it? And in secret? And then, suddenly, Paul knew as plainly as though someone had told him. Penny was testing God. That was it. She was testing the strength and power of God. If He could get her this dog for Christmas, He could make her walk again. Paul felt sick at the pit of his stomach.

Penny smiled placidly. "I feel better now I've told you," she said. "Secrets get too big sometimes, don't they?"

"Yes," he said, "they do." And his mind was filled with whirling thoughts. Where could you get a gold-colored dog with curly ears that could be called Star, especially at nine o'clock on Christmas Eve?
He got up and tried to smile at Penny. "I'm glad you told me," he said. "But I'm going to have to leave, Penny, I've got so much to do. Merry Christmas, sweetheart."

"Merry Christmas," she answered, and her voice sounded relaxed and sleepy.

Paul hurried from the room and went to the living room. Guy and Nancy Ellis looked up from the packages they were wrapping.

"Finished talking so soon?" Nancy said.

Paul nodded. "I've got to talk to you," he whispered, "where Penny won't hear."

Guy regarded him with something like suspicion and Nancy spoke quickly.

"I'll just run in and cover her up," she said, "Then we can go into the kitchen to talk where she can't hear."

Paul and Guy waited without speaking until Nancy came back, and then they went together down the hall to the kitchen.

"Is something wrong?" Nancy asked.

"I'll say something is wrong," Paul said. "That poor little kid has got her heart completely set on something for Christmas that she hasn't told either one of you about."

"Oh, no!" Nancy's hand went to her mouth.

"What is it?" Guy asked. "I'll get her anything. She's had enough of a rotten deal. What is it?"

"She prayed about it," Paul explained. "She asked God to give it to her. It's a dog she wants and from the description I'd say she wants a gold cocker spaniel and she wants to name it Star because it came on Christmas."

Nancy and Guy stared at him without speaking. He knew they were thinking, as he had, that it would be impossible to find a dog like that now, at this hour, on Christmas Eve.

"Why didn't she tell me?" Guy said, and his voice was savage. "Why did she have to pray about it?"
Paul felt sure the other man's thoughts were bitter ones, that he was thinking he could give to his child the things God would not or could not give. Paul tried to speak gently. "I think she's sort of testing God," he said. "I think she feels if He can get her a dog, He can do anything." He paused. "Even make her walk," he said.

There were tears on Nancy's face.

"The doctors say she might walk," she whispered. "But she'll have to believe it herself."

"How can she believe it when I don't believe it?" Guy said, and the hopelessness was evident in his voice. "She'll never walk again. Never."

Nancy turned on him. "If it weren't for you," she said, but she kept her voice pitched low, "Penny wouldn't have felt it necessary to try God out. It's your lack of faith that has made her afraid."

Guy stared at his wife, and Paul's heart ached for both of them.

"I can't help it," Guy said. "I just can't help it."

"You don't try," Nancy sobbed. "You don't even try. And now, what's going to happen to her? We can't get the dog. You know we can't."

"We can try," Paul interposed. "Come on, Guy. I've got two hours till church service. Let's get going."

While Guy went for his wraps, Paul spoke to Nancy. "Did you know Penny prayed much?" he asked. "I mean, had she ever told you?"

Nancy wiped at tears with her hands. "Yes," she said shakily. "Sometimes I go in and her eyes are shut and her lips are moving, and when I speak to her she looks very reproachful and says she's talking to God. I thought it was all right."

"It is all right," Paul said. "You know it is." In the midst of all his troubled thoughts he remembered Jeannie's voice saying, "I remembered about six o'clock I hadn't fixed a thing for Penny Ellis,"

I'm being foolish, Paul thought, this is crazy. But he stilled the cynicism and forced himself to ask the question. "Nancy," he said, "did you notice Penny praying tonight?"

She thought for a minute. "Why, yes," she answered, "when I took in her supper, about six o'clock. Why?"
"Nothing," Paul said, but he felt a great stirring in his heart, a great trembling.

"Where'11 we start?" Guy said.

"My house," Paul decided. "We can use the phone without Penny hearing, We'll call the owner of every pet store we can find."

"There's only two," Guy reminded him. "It isn't as if we were in a big city."

"We'll call the police," Paul went on. "Maybe they've picked up a stray."

"I don't think it'll do any good," Guy said.

Paul felt a touch of impatience. "Well, at least we can try before we give up."

Guy hunched his chin into his collar. "I guess it's pretty easy for a preacher to have faith," he said, and his voice was filled with mockery, "when he's never had trouble or sorrow."

Paul's impatience died away. "No," he said. "It's not even easy then."

Guy's face jerked toward the minister, "You mean you have doubts, too?"

"I think everyone has doubts," Paul said, "only some of mine are going away." And, on sudden impulse, he told Guy of Penny's praying for him to come to her and of Jeannie's decision to make the gingerbread boy.

"Coincidence," Guy said. "You know it if you're an educated man."

"Maybe," said Paul, because part of him felt that Guy was right and he was weary from the warring in his soul.

An hour and a half later, Guy and Paul were riding hopelessly and almost aimlessly through the snow-filled streets. They had spent half an hour on the telephone and an hour driving around in the cold, but they had been completely unsuccessful.

"Now talk about prayer," Guy said bitterly. "Or haven't you prayed about this dog? Is that too little a thing to bother God about?"

"Of course I've prayed," Paul said. "Because it isn't little. Because I think if Penny could get this dog it would give her all the faith she'd need to walk again."
"I believe that too," Guy admitted, and his words sounded ragged. "Only there isn't any dog."

"Maybe if you prayed too?" Paul suggested, and he knew that Jeannie and Nancy were adding their prayers to his.

"Me?" Guy said. "Why should I? Do you think a God who would let a little kid get crippled would help us find a dog?"

Paul realized the man was crying and he thought, I wish I knew what to say. I wish I had confidence to give him. I wish I could say that it's bound to happen just because it's Christmas. But I can't say that.

The motor coughed and Paul glanced swiftly at the dashboard. He was out of gas, and at this hour! But when he glanced up again, he saw that he was within a block of a gas station and the owner, Dick Hayson, who lived next door to the station, was one of his parishioners. I'm in luck, Paul thought, and let the car drift coughing to the driveway of the station. He stopped by one of the tanks and went to ask Hayson for some gas.

Hayson was obliging and, while he filled the tank, Paul looked at his watch. Only 25 minutes until he had to be in church for the midnight service. And no dog for Penny. And no comfort or peace to offer to the unhappy man in his car. Paul silently pounded one clenched fist into the other hand.

At that moment a sound came through the night, a soft hesitant sound. The whimper of a small dog. Paul looked up, dazed and unbelieving, to see a gold cocker spaniel come toward him across the snow-covered drive. The puppy stopped in front of Paul, and, staring down at the dog, Paul felt himself possessed of the urge to shout with exultation. And at the same instant, he felt a great compulsion to stand in silence and reverence as though this were a holy place.

Dick Hayson looked up to see the dog at Paul's feet. "Well, I'll be darned," he said. "How'd that pup get out? He must have squeezed out right past my feet."

It was almost too much for Paul. His hopes had soared and fallen too many times, and he felt battered from it all.

He wet his lips with his tongue and managed to speak at last. "You mean it's yours?" And what did you think, a tired, bitter voice said in his heart that God would fashion a cocker puppy out of snow?

Hayson smiled. "Got it for my boy for Christmas. Cute, isn't he?"
Paul nodded humbly. He wanted to weep but he managed to say courteously, "Yes! I hope it will be a happy surprise for your boy "

Hayson laughed, and his laughter had a rueful sound. "It'll be a surprise all right but I don't know how happy. He wants another kind of dog altogether."

Paul stood very still but he felt a trembling in his body. Again he licked his lips and when he spoke his voice came in a husky whisper, "\¥hat kind of a dog?" he asked, but he knew what the answer would be.

"A dachshund. But we couldn't find one anywhere."

The night was suddenly starred with serenity. This was right, Paul knew, not an ethereal, impossible-to-understand miracle, but a practical thing. Coincidence? questioned his heart once more, but his faith was stronger, all at once, than any questioning. This wasn't coincidence, but a Plan conceived in love and executed with mercy.

In a few brief words, he explained the situation to Hayson and promised to come back immediately after the midnight service with a dachshund puppy if he could take the gold cocker spaniel to Penny. Hayson was delighted, handed the little dog to Paul, and went back to his house shaking his head in wonderment at his "luck."

Paul walked to the car, and when Guy Ellis looked up and saw the dog, his face seemed to sag. "Whose is it?" he managed to ask.

"Penny's," Paul said.

"But where'd it come from?"

Paul looked into the other man's eyes. "I think God sent it," he said.

"I don't see it couldn't can you explain " Guy began, stammering.

Paul put the dog into the other man's arms and explained what had happened as he drove along the snowy street.

"It's a coincidence," Guy said at last, but his voice was not steady.

"But a God-given coincidence," Paul said.

"But God didn't just send him through the air," Guy insisted. "If we had just stayed home praying, the dog wouldn't have come floating through a window."
"Probably not. Maybe we have to help miracles happen." And it was a moment of discovery for Paul, too. "But God did answer Penny's prayer, Guy. Somehow, He did."

"Maybe I guess you're right," Guy said at last, and Paul heard the faint warmth of hope in Guy's voice. Maybe with hope would come faith, the young minister exulted silently, all the faith Penny would need in the days ahead.

After he delivered Guy and the dog, he hurried home to get Jeannie. He was filled with a recurring sense of wonder as he told her about the dog, and she accepted the news with gladness, but he knew somehow that she had never doubted it would happen.

They walked together to the church, and just before they reached the door, Paul turned to Jeannie.

"I didn't believe it would happen," he confessed. "I needed the the miracle too, Jeannie. Why can't my faith stay strong?"

She smiled and squeezed his hand. "Peter had to have the walking on the water," she said. "Everyone needs something like that once in a while to help him."

"But not you," he protested.

"I have a miracle growing in me," she said. "And I have you. That's all I need."

They walked into the church together, and the night was bright with candles and the sound of the organ and the glimmering of the fragile star above the altar. Paul looked at it and thought of the light that would be in Penny's eyes when she saw her golden Christmas Star the next morning.

A great happiness filled him and his eyes clung to Jeannie's face as he sang with his people, "Joy to the World, the Lord Is Come."

When Father Christmas Was Young By Coningsby Dawson

Someone had hinted that there wasn't a Santa Claus. If there wasn't, who brought Christmas presents? For weeks, when Mac had been put to bed and was supposed to be asleep, he had Iain awake puzzling. He had reached the point at which suspense ached like a guilty conscience. He simply had to share his secret with a wiser person.

He had postponed and postponed till at last it was Christmas Eve. All day Daddy had been finishing a story. Daddy could be so inconvenient. When he was finishing a story, he turned the key in his lock and everybody went on tiptoe.

Mac had returned from his afternoon's walk with Nannie. Streets and stores had been gay with excited preparations. To make things perfect, snow was falling. Mac had prayed for snow. He'd set himself a task, which was nothing less than to prove that Santa Claus existed. If there was snow on housetops, it would be impossible for old Santa to tether his reindeer to chimneys without leaving tracks.

And now to take Daddy into his confidence. Having escaped from the nursery, he twisted the handle of the study door. It wasn't locked. An instant later a jolly voice invited him to enter. Across the threshold he halted, his fat legs astride, a worried expression on his cherubic countenance.

"I've been thinking, Daddy."

"You don't say, old son! Climb on my knee and tell me."

The red lacquer room with the fire shining afforded a friendly setting. Yet Mac couldn't blurt out the wicked heresy he had overheard. Instead he cuddled against the smoky jacket and asked:

"Who was Santa when he was young? He's terribly old now, but he must have been little as me once. Who taught him to be fond of reindeer and to come down chimbleys and to leave presents? Was he the first to do things like that or did he have a mummy and daddy who did them before him?"

His father filled and lit a pipe. He was playing for time. He hated to disappoint his son; he hated still more to deceive him. He said:

"I'm afraid you'll consider me a most ignorant parent. I don't know the answer to a single one of your questions. I ought to. I've no excuse. With your help, I propose to educate myself. Do you see all those books the tall ones? They're books of reference, which means that they can answer anything. All you have to do is to open them and turn to the word 'potato/ for instance; every fact about a potato is recorded. Let's make a game of it and go on a hunt. . . . What shall we look for?" Daddy prompted.

"Santa Claus."

Daddy ran his eyes along the shelves.

" 'Who's Who in America.' We shan't find him mentioned there; he's international. Let's try the encyclopedia."

But the encyclopedia proved stodgy. As soon as you'd hit on what you thought you wanted, it referred you to another volume. Having looked up Santa Claus, you were at once informed that you ought to have looked up Saint Nicholas. When you looked up Saint Nicholas you were told that he had lived in a funny place called Myra in Lycia. In fact he'd been a bishop who had been tortured to death. He had gained the reputation of being fond of children. In England alone four hundred churches had been dedicated to his memory, each of them containing a stained-glass window representing him pulling three little boys out of a tub.

"That's silly, Daddy. Why a tub?"

"Goodness knows. But listen, Doodles; this is interesting. He's the Russian Santa Claus and the greatest saint in Russia; that brings him close to reindeer. Reindeer live up north in Lapland. And here's something else; after he'd been dead for hundreds of years, some people from another city stole his bones, made a huge procession and built an enormous church over him. After which all the world started to make pilgrimages to his sepulcher. He worked miracles, especially for children."

"Go on, Daddy. Read more."

"It ends there." Daddy frowned. "Darn the idiots; they always dry up when you're hoping to learn something. Tell you what the last volume is an index; we'll look up Christmas."

The items recorded about Christmas were even more confusing. The origin of the yule log was traced and the prerogatives of the Lord of Misrule. In olden days, it appeared, the Lord of Misrule a sort of clown was appointed to direct the Christmas festivities. He was king for a day, who did whatever he pleased while the season lasted. In still older days he'd been the king of the Roman Saturnalia and had been killed at the end of the revels for having made himself a nuisance.

"Very enlightening!" Daddy banged the volume back on its shelf. "That helps a lot."

Taking down another volume he struck luck and grew good-humored. He had run across the name Befana.

"By Jove, that's a new one!"

The little boy peered above his shoulder. The words were too long for him to spell.

"Is it about reindeer, Daddy?"

"It isn't. It's about stockings. According to what's printed here, this Befana was a fairy. The Three Wise Men on their journey to Bethlehem passed by her cottage. She was too busy or too disagreeable to look out of her window said she'd see them when they came back. Of course they didn't come back, on account of Herod. Her punishment was to gaze in vain from her window for them always."

"Is she still gazing, Dad?"

"I expect so. But that's not all. She was given a second punishment; on the anniversary of the night when she'd been too busy to see the Wise Men pass, she was ordered to fill children's stockings. But the angel who ordered her punishment was careless. What he'd meant was that she must fill children's stockings with presents. He didn't say with presents; he forgot. As she was spiteful, what do you suppose she did? She filled the children's stockings with ashes."

"She doesn't now. I never found no ashes in my stocking," Mac objected.

"Neither did I," Daddy agreed. "Something that these stupid books don't relate must have happened."

"Then look up stockings," Mac suggested. "We'll find the rest of the story."

"Afraid not." Daddy shoved the books back on the shelves disgustedly. "The trouble with the fellows who write all this learned rot is that they aren't poets. If we're going to discover the truth about when Father Christmas was young, we'll have to make it up."

"Are we poets?" The little boy blushed at the compliment.

"You bet at least you are. All children are poets they're much wiser than these encyclopedia fellows. We believe in Santa Claus, you and I, Doodles; they don't and didn't. They were like Befana, who might have ridden with the Wise Men to Bethlehem if only she hadn't been too busy to have faith."

"Can't one be busy if one has faith?" the little boy inquired.

"Not often. Being busy kills faith, as a rule. I've been busy lately too busy. That's why I'm appealing to you. You're not busy because you're young. That's the reason you ought to believe in almost everything. If you try, I'm certain you can tell me about Santa's boyhood,"

They shifted the lamp, so that it spilled a pool of illumination over the deep armchair. Minutes ticked by. They sat as though merged into one.

"I'm waiting," Daddy urged.

"Don't know where to start."

"That's obvious with Befana. She lived in a forest so dark that she hardly ever saw the sun. A highroad ran through it along which camels plodded with their tinkling bells. You see, even I know that."

"I know more." Mac wagged a finger, imitating one of his father's gestures.

"Then, for the love of Mike, prove it."

"Befana was like you, Daddy, when you're finishing a story; she was cross, but she wasn't bad."

"Is that so?" Daddy chuckled. "Thanks for your frankness."

"Yes, that's so, Daddy. If she wasn't finishing something, she was hurrying to begin something."

"What sort of things, Doodles?"

"Don't 'zactly know. But yet, I do," Mac corrected himself. "She was a writer of fairy stories. She lived in the dark forest 'cause she simply had to be quiet, same as you lock your door. She never could find time to do her housework, so she was very glad one morning when she opened her door and saw Santa on her step."

"What on earth was he doing there?"

"He wasn't doing miffing; he'd been left. Someone passing with the camels had dropped him. He was as tiny as a doll. He couldn't even talk and the bottle beside him was empty. Be-fana took him in and stared. She twiddled his toes, and he laughed. She thought, 'He's an orphling. I can keep him. I'll learn him to do my housework.' "

"Teach, Mackie not learn."

"All right, teach," Mac conceded, "but it don't make no difference. Not till evening, when she was putting him to bed, did she learn what he was called. A piece of paper had been pinned to his frock with 'Nick' written on it. That was what he was called first; the Santa name came after."

"Did he have a beard?" Daddy questioned.

"Course not; nor no hair. He was a baby." Mac cuddled closer. "Befana washed his bottles and pushed his pram through the forest. She was sorry for him, but he was an awful bother,"

"I'm surprised to hear that she was sorry for him," Daddy attempted to guide the story. "A fairy who could be so cruel as to put ashes into children's stockings "

"But listen," Mac seized his father's chin. "She wasn't married. She didn't know about chilling; she spoiled him and upset his stomach. She let him sit up late, the way you let me on Christmas. She did it every night and she gave him candies before breakfast."

"Extremely foolish!" Daddy looked shocked. "Why did she?"

"To keep him quiet so she could do her fairy stories. As he growed bigger, he learned to talk. She couldn't write when people talked. To get rid of him, she ordered him to do all the housework, which was hard for a little boy. And he cooked the meals and he swept and dusted."

"Befana must have been a great lazy lump," Daddy interrupted. "Didn't she help him?"

"She was always writing. Jack-and-the-Bean-stalk was one of hers. So was Cinderella. Oh, almost all of them."

"I believe you are inventing." Daddy squinted down his nose.

"Trufe and honor I'm not," Mac asserted. "Her fingers was inky. Nick would call to her to come and play. She would shake her head. He was most awful lonely. When he'd dusted the cottage, he'd go out and sit by the road to watch the camels pass. He would wonder where the camels were going and wish he could follow them. Sometimes he'd wonder whether they was driven by people what had dropped him. He was about as big as me, when one day coming terrible fast "

"How fast would you say, Mackie?"

"As fast as when we ride in a taxi. They was three racing camels, each with a man sitting on him. The men wore crowns and was all dressed up. He knowed they must be kings. A great white star floated over them just above the branches. It made the forest, which was always dark, quite bright. Nacherly he guessed something wonderful was going to happen."

"Naturally," Daddy nodded.

"Well, little Nick, who was no bigger than me, thought they were going to rush past him. But they saw him in time and they pulled up.

" "Little boy,' one of them asked, 'where is Bethlehem?' "

"He said more than that." Daddy wished to be helpful. "He said, 'Where is He that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and are come to worship Him.'"

"P'raps he did," Mac grudgingly agreed. "Nick was so little he'd never heard of Bethlehem. He asked the Wise Men to wait a minute while he runned in and asked Aunt Befana. He was breathless with climbing the stairs to her study. The door was locked. When he tapped, she didn't answer. Then he started to explain, the way I do to you, Daddy, through the keyhole.

" 'Go 'way,' she grunted.

"The Wise Men was in a hurry, so Nick didn't dare stop longer. He had to go back and say that Aunt Befana was too busy even to answer their question.

"They rode away very sad, the star sailing over them. Soon the forest grew dark, like it always was.

"That night at supper Nick told Aunt Befana how they'd rode on racing camels, wearing crowns, so that he was sure they was kings.

" 'Kings don't wear crowns when they ride camels. You're fibbing,' she said.

"She didn't want to believe that he was telling the trufe, so she spanked him.

"Next day she couldn't write fairy tales for fancying what she'd missed. She'd never seen three kings all together. She made Nick come to her study and promised not to spank him if he'd tell her over again what had happened."

"But you're forgetting, Mackie." Daddy caressed the bare knees. "I didn't halt you before because I hoped you might remember. Two of the kings were old; but the third was young. The young one had told Nick why they were in such a hurry to reach Bethlehem. A baby was to be born who would be King of all the world. When He grew up He would be King, especially of children. He would take them in His arms and play with them. Nick had never been properly loved and he'd never been played with at all. He wished he'd been born later, so he could have played with the King of children. As it was, he'd be a man by the time the King was grown up, so he'd be too big for the King to take him in His arms. Most of this he said to Befana. The more he talked about the
 
Wise Men, the more sorry she became that she hadn't taken the time off to see them.

" 'But I haven't missed much,' she pretended; 'they'll be coming back.'

"As you know, Doodles, they didn't."

" 'Cause of Herod."

"Precisely. They were warned in a dream that Herod would seek the child to slay Him, so they went back to the East secretly by a different route."

"But Befana didn't know they'd been warned." Mac seized the telling of the story. "Every day she sat by her study window watching. She hid behind her curtains ashamed, so Nick wouldn't see her and would think she was writing. And, Daddy, I forgot to tell you. She kept the table spread for five instead of two. You see why, don't you?"

"So as to be ready to invite the Three Kings to eat a meal with her, whatever hour they returned," Daddy conjectured. "Do you know that's very interesting? People still do it in Russia. They bake King's Cake and put it outside the door on Christmas Eve to let the Three Kings know they're welcome."

"Befana did the same," Mac nodded like a turtle. "She called it King's Cake, too. But don't you think, Daddy, that you could tell a little of the story?"

"With pleasure," Daddy stroked the narrow shoulders. "As the news began to spread about the wonder-child who had been born at Bethlehem she regretted everything most dreadfully. One day when