The teacher looked at the paper in a puzzled way
“We shouldn’t have any Christmas treat, for after the way the teacher had talked about treating, no one thought he would treat if he could help it, and here was a way out for him. The next day we were perfectly sure he did not intend to treat, for when William Orbison left out a word in his reading lesson the teacher said, ‘Watch yourself, William. Leaving out words is getting to be quite a habit with you.’
“Other years we could hardly wait till the day before Christmas. We wore our best clothes, and right after dinner we would speak pieces, have spelling and ciphering matches, sing songs, have our treat, and play games the rest of the afternoon. Lots of the older brothers and sisters would come to visit, and they would play with us and the teacher would play, too, and we would have lots of fun.
“But this year I should rather have stayed at home and watched the Christmas preparations at our house, for there wouldn’t be much fun at school without any treat.
“It was a cold, windy morning, and Father took us to school in the sled. We had lessons in the morning as usual, and in the afternoon recitations and songs and a little play that the teacher had helped us get up. Truman gave ‘Hamlet’s Soliloquy,’ and did it very well, too. And Charlie had a piece, but he forgot all but the first verse. We were so interested that we didn’t think about the treat, and you can imagine how surprised we were when the teacher, instead of dismissing us, said that we would now have an unexpected but very welcome visitor. The door opened, and in came old Santa Claus with a white beard and a red coat and on his back the biggest bag! You should have seen our eyes pop! Of course it wasn’t the really, truly Santa Claus who comes in the night and fills the stockings. Oh, no, this was just a pretend Santa.
“He put his bag down on the teacher’s platform, and after he had made a little speech he opened it up.
“And what do you suppose was in that bag? Candy! Cream candy and chocolate drops and clear candy, red and yellow, shaped like animals and horns and baskets, such candy as we had never seen before. A sack for each pupil.
“As we went up, one by one, the smallest first, to get our treat, Santa asked each one of us to recite something for him. The smaller children knew verses out of their readers, and some of us recited the pieces we had said earlier in the afternoon. But how we all laughed when Longford Henlen, who was the tallest boy in school, couldn’t think of anything to say but,
“I had a little dog, his name was Jack,
Put him in the barn, he jumped through a crack.