Miss Santa Claus of the Pullman

by Annie F. Johnston

But next morning he was glad that he was not living at the Junction, for he started to kindergarten, and a world of new interests opened up before him. Benjy came back to town that week, but he did not find quite the same tractable follower. Will'm had learned how to play with other boys, and how to make other boys do his bidding, so he did not always allow Benjy to dictate. Still the leaven of an uneasy presence began working again, and worked on till it was suddenly counteracted by the coming of another Christmas season.

Both Libby and Will'm began to feel its approach when it was still a month off. They felt it in the mysterious thrills that began to stir the household as sap, rising in a tree, thrills it with stirrings of spring. There were secrets and whisperings. There was counting of pennies and planning of ways to earn more, for they were wiser about Christmas this year. They knew that there are three kinds of presents. There is the kind that Santa Claus puts into your stocking, just because he is Santa Claus, and the Sky Road leads from his Kingdom of Giving straight to the kingdom of little hearts who love and believe in him.

Then there's the kind that you give to the people you love, just because you love them, and you put your name on those. And third, there's the kind that you give secretly, in the name of Santa Claus, just to help him out if he is extra busy and should happen to send you word that he needs your services.

Libby and Will'm received no such messages, being so small, but their father had one. He sent a load of coal and some rent money to a man who had lost a month's wages on account of sickness in his family, and it must have been a very happy and delightful feeling that Santa Claus gave their father for doing it, for his voice sounded that way afterward when he said, "After all, Molly, that's the best kind of giving. We ought to do more of it and less of the other."

When it came to the first kind of presents, neither Libby nor Will'm made a choice. They sent their names and addresses up the chimney so that the reindeer might be guided to the right roof-top, and left the rest to the generosity of the reindeer's wise master to surprise them as he saw fit. They were almost sure that the things they daily expressed a wish for would come by the way of the Christmas tree as the doll and the tricycle had the year before, "with the love of father and mother."

But when it came to the second kind of presents, they had much to consider. They wanted to give to the family and each other, and the cook and their teachers, and the children they played with most and half a dozen people at the Junction. The visit which they had planned all year was to be a certainty now. The day after Christmas the entire family was to go for a week's visit, to Grandma and Uncle Neal.

That last week the children went around the house in one continual thrill of anticipation. Such delicious odors of popcorn and boiling candy, of cake and mincemeat in the making floated up from the kitchen! Such rustling of tissue paper and scent of sachets as met one on the opening of bureau drawers! And such rapt moments of gift-making when Libby sewed with patient, learning fingers, and Will'm pasted paper chains and wove paper baskets, as he had been taught in kindergarten!

One day the conductor's punch suddenly reappeared, and he seized it with a whoop of joy. Now all his creations could be doubly beautiful since they could be star-bordered. As he punched and punched and the tiny stars fell in a shower, the story of Ina and the swans stirred in his memory, with all the glamour it had worn when he first heard it over his dish of strawberries. Down in his secret soul he determined to do what he wished he had done a year earlier, to begin to follow the example of Ina.

The family could not fail to notice the almost angelic behavior which began that day. They thought it was because of the watching eye he feared up the chimney, but no one referred to the change. He used to sit in front of the fire sometimes, just as he had done at the Junction, rocking and singing, his soft bobbed hair flapping over his ears every time the rockers tilted forward. But he was not singing with any thought that he might be overheard and written down as a good little boy. He was singing just because the story of the Camels and the Star was so very sweet, and the mere thought of angels and silver bells and the glittering Sky Road brought a tingling joy. But more than all he was singing because he had begun to weave the big beautiful mantle whose name is Love, and the curious little left-out-in-the-cold feeling was gone.