However, Reuben, who was not an ill-natured man, grinned as he spoke. Into his small brown eyes leapt a spark of malicious mischief.
“I’ll fix up his stockin’; I vum I will,” declared Reuben. He began to laugh. They all laughed.
“What are you going to do, Reuben?” inquired Nancy.
Reuben whispered. The heads of the three conspirators were close together. When Reuben finished, they all laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks. Reuben’s plan seemed to them such a joke.
The three, stifling their laughter, filled the blue yarn stocking. When it hung bulging, they fairly clung together and reeled, they were so overcome by the fun of the thing.
“He will come down by dawn to find it,” giggled Nancy. She and Sarah slept on the ground floor, Reuben above.
“I will sleep with one ear open,” said he. “I shall hear him come downstairs.”
“Mind you don’t let him hear you,” cautioned Sarah. “Nancy and I will be on the lookout.”
Soon the house was still. The street was still, hushed by an evening of fast-falling snow. Everybody slept except Tommy. He lay awake in a sort of ecstasy. He did not know what he expected. Afterward he was never able to define the nature of his joyful expectancy, but he lay awake in one of the transports of awaited happiness which do not come often in a lifetime. All the beautiful symbolism of Christmas was astir in him, like a strain of wonderful music. Little New England boy, who had never known a Yuletide, it may be that ancestral memory had been awakened in him, that the joy of his ancestors over the merry holy time of the year thrilled him.
The storm clouds had passed. He could see a great star from his window. He gazed at it so steadily that its rays became multiplied. Finally the star, to his concentrated vision, seemed surrounded by a halo of rainbows. He lay there waiting for the dawn, in such bliss as he might never again in his whole life attain, since that bliss was to be dashed back into the very face of his soul with a shock as of spiritual ice.