So, since they had no King nor Queen, the people locked the front door of the Palace and threw the key away. The crowns they fastened over the Toy Shop and the Candy Shop because they looked well hanging there.
Bo-Peep Town became overnight what it had always been before, a gay and lively and pleasant place in which to live.
And Silvertongue and Kindheart and Sweet-Tooth went home happy, but not any more happy than Santa Claus when he heard what they had done.
BUTTONS AND BOOTS
BUTTONS AND BOOTS
It was the middle of the night. All the Brownies, and Santa Claus, too, were fast asleep in their beds in the Snow Palace at the very tip-top of the North Pole.
It was a cold, frosty night. ‘Whoo-oo-oo! Whoo-oo-oo!’ sang the West Wind round the chimneys, in such a chilly voice, with a tinkle of ice in it, that the Brownies snuggled down under their covers and pulled the bed-quilts up about their ears.
All the Brownies were fast asleep, I said. But, as the great clock in the hall downstairs slowly boomed out the hour of twelve, Brownie Fleetfoot opened his bright black eyes.
‘Ugh! How cold it is!’ shivered Brownie Fleetfoot, trying to roll himself into a ball. ‘It wasn’t so cold when I went to bed. I wonder what the Moon is laughing at up there in the sky. He likes to see me freeze, I guess.’
For a great silver Moon, with a broad smile on his face, was looking straight in the window at Fleetfoot, and it did seem as if he were laughing at some joke of his own.