"Well, Father is so particular about poetry—somehow—I—I—"
"Why, daughter!"
"You know you are! You can't abide mediocre verse."
"Well, that's so," he confessed, "but you might let me be the judge."
And so I recited my sonnet, which I will repeat to save the reader the trouble of turning back so many pages to refresh her memory.
"Pan may be dead, but Santa Claus remains,
And once a year, he riseth in his might.
Oft have I heard, in silences of night,
Tinkling of bells and clink of reindeer chains
As o'er the roofs he sped through his domains,
When youthful eyes had given up the fight
To glimpse for once the rotund, jolly wight,
Who in a trusting world unchallenged reigns.
Last and the greatest of all Gods is he,
Who suffereth little children and is kind;
And when I've rounded out my earthly span
And face at last the Ancient Mystery,
I hope somewhere in Heaven I shall find
Rest on the bosom of that good old man."
When I finished, Father sat so still that I just knew he thought it was trash. I could hardly raise my eyes to see, I was so afraid he was laughing at me. Father, while being the kindest and most lenient man in the world, was very strict about literature and demanded the best. I finally did get my eyes to behave and look up at him and to my amazement I found his were full of tears. He held out his arms to me and I flew to them, thereby upsetting a plate of Sally Lunn muffins that bow-legged Bill was just bringing into the dining room. Zebedee caught them, however, before they touched the ground, so no harm was done.
"Page! You monkey!" was all Father could say, but I knew he liked my sonnet and I was very happy. He told me afterwards when we were alone that he liked it a lot and how I must work to do more and more verse. If I felt like writing, to write, no matter what was to pay.
"I have got so lazy about it myself," he sighed. "When I was a boy I wanted to write all the time and did 'lisp in numbers' to some extent, but I got more and more out of it, did not put my thoughts down, and now I can only think poetry and don't believe I could write a line. Don't let it slip from you, honey."
I had done my part, and now Zebedee was to be diked out as Santa Claus and give the little darkeys a treat that they would remember all their lives. Some of the bulky bundles the guests had brought from Richmond contained presents for our coloured neighbours. I had told Dum and Dee of the way Father and I always spent Christmas morning, and they had remembered when they did their Christmas shopping. They had gone to the five and ten cent store and, with what they declared was a very small outlay, had bought enough toys to gladden the hearts of all the nigs in the county.