The other letter was from a lonely old widow, almost as old as my dear mother in Denmark, and it contained a two-dollar bill. For years, she wrote, she had saved and saved, hoping some time to have five dollars, and then she would go with me to the homes of the very poor and be Santa Claus herself. "And wherever you decided it was right to leave a trifle, that should be the place where it would be left," read the letter. But now she was so old that she could no longer think of such a trip and so she sent the money she had saved. And I thought of a family in one of those tenements where father and mother are both lying ill, with a boy, who ought to be in school, fighting all alone to keep the wolf from the door, and winning the fight. I guess he has been too busy to send any message up the chimney, if indeed there is one in his house; but you ask him, right now, whether he thinks there is a Santa Claus or not.
No Santa Claus? Yes, my little man, there is a Santa Claus, thank God! Your father had just forgotten. The world would indeed be poor without one. It is true that he does not always wear a white beard and drive a reindeer team—not always, you know—but what does it matter? He is Santa Claus with the big, loving, Christmas heart, for all that; Santa Claus with the kind thoughts for every one that make children and grown-up people beam with happiness all day long. And shall I tell you a secret which I did not learn at the post-office, but it is true all the same—of how you can always be sure your letters go to him straight by the chimney route? It is this: send along with them a friendly thought for the boy you don't like: for Jack who punched you, or Jim who was mean to you. The meaner he was the harder do you resolve to make it up: not to bear him a grudge. That is the stamp for the letter to Santa. Nobody can stop it, not even a cross-draught in the chimney, when it has that on.
Because—don't you know, Santa Claus is the spirit of Christmas: and ever and ever so many years ago when the dear little Baby was born after whom we call Christmas, and was cradled in a manger out in the stable because there was not room in the inn, that Spirit came into the world to soften the hearts of men and make them love one another. Therefore, that is the mark of the Spirit to this day. Don't let anybody or anything rub it out. Then the rest doesn't matter. Let them tear Santa's white beard off at the Sunday-school festival and growl in his bearskin coat. These are only his disguises. The steps of the real Santa Claus you can trace all through the world as you have done here with me, and when you stand in the last of his tracks you will find the Blessed Babe of Bethlehem smiling a welcome to you. For then you will be home.
THE CROGANS' CHRISTMAS IN THE SNOWSHED
A storm was brewing in the mountains. The white glare of the earlier day had been supplanted by a dull gray, and the peaks that shut the winter landscape in were "smoking," sure harbinger of a blizzard already raging in the high Sierras. The pines above the Crogans' cabin stood like spectral sentinels in the failing light, their drooping branches heavy with the snow of many storms. Mrs. Tom Crogan sat at the window looking listlessly into the darkening day.
In the spring she had come with her husband from the little Minnesota town that was their home, full of hope and the joy of life. The mountains were beautiful then with wild flowers and the sweet smell of fragrant firs, and as she rocked her baby to sleep in their deep shadows she sang to him the songs her mother had crooned over her cradle in her tuneful Swedish tongue. Life then had seemed very fair, and the snowshed hardly a shadow across it. For to her life there were two sides: one that looked out upon the mountains and the trees and the wild things that stirred in God's beautiful world; the other the blind side that turned toward the darkness man had made in his fight to conquer that world. Tom Crogan was a dispatcher at a signal station in the great snowsheds that stretched forty miles or more up the slopes of the Sierras, plunging the road to the Land of Sunshine into hour-long gloom just when the jagged "saw-tooth" peaks, that give the range its name, came into sight. Travelers knew them to their grief: a huge crawling thing of timber and stout planks—so it seemed as one caught fleeting glimpses of it in the brief escapes from its murky embrace—that followed the mountain up, hugging its side close as it rose farther and farther toward the summit. Hideous always, in winter buried often out of sight by the smashing avalanches Old Boreas hurled at the pigmy folk who dared challenge him in his own realm; but within the shelter of the snowsheds they laughed at his bluster, secure from harm, for then it served its appointed purpose.
The Crogans' house fronted or backed—whichever way one chose to look at it—upon the shed. Tom's office, where the telegraph ticker was always talking of men and things in the desert sands to the east, or in the orange groves over the Divide, never saw the sunshine it told of. It burrowed in perpetual gloom. Nine times a day trains full of travelers, who peered curiously at the signalmen with their lanterns and at Tom as so many human moles burrowing in the mountain, came and went, and took the world of men with them, yawning as they departed at the prospect of more miles of night. At odd intervals long freight trains lingered, awaiting orders, and lent a more human touch. For the engineer had time to swap yarns with Tom, and the brakemen looked in to chuck the baby under the chin and to predict, when their smudge faces frightened him, that he would grow up to be as fine a railroader as his father: his yell was as good as a whistle to "down brakes." Even a wandering hobo once in a while showed his face from behind the truck on which he was stealing a ride 'cross country, and grimaced at Mrs. Tom, safe in the belief that she would not give him away. And she didn't.
But now the winter had come with the heavy snows that seemed never to end. She could not venture out upon the mountain where the pines stood buried many feet deep. In truth there was no getting out. Her life side was banked up, as it were, to stay so till spring came again. As she sat watching the great white waste that sloped upward toward the lowering sky she counted the months: two, three, four—five, probably, or six, to wait. For this was Christmas, and the winter was but fairly under way. Five months! The winters were hard enough on the plains, but the loneliness of these mountains! What glad visiting and holiday-making were going on now in her old home among kindred and friends! There it was truly a season of kindliness and good cheer; they had brought their old Norse Yule with them across the seas. She choked back a sob as she stirred the cradle with her foot. For Tom's sake she would be brave. But no letter nor word had come from the East, and this their first Christmas away from home!