The next morning Santa Claus received the most surprising letter. He thought it was too late for Christmas letters, but here came one on this very day before Christmas. It was from Jerry Juddikins, and it was written in the wildest haste. You could tell that by the handwriting. It said: Dear Santa Claus: I, love girls now, please, please. put a girl just like Katinka in my book,.
So Benjamin Bookfellow wrote all morning and all afternoon, a beautiful blue book with pirates and dragons and soldiers in it and a heroine who was just like Katinka, and that night Santa Claus took it to Whippoorwill Road and put it in Jerry’s stocking.
And every day after that Jerry carried his precious book under his arm, and every night he slept with it under his pillow, and he was the happiest boy in the whole world and Katinka was his best friend.
[16] Reprinted from “Jerry Juddikins” by special permission of David McKay Company, publishers, and the author.
THE BISHOP AND THE CARDINAL[17]
George Madden Martin
The spread of the spruce-tree at its base, where its branches rested on the snow in the bishop’s yard, was thirty feet. The apex, to which the branches mounted in slanting tiers, was fifty feet above the ground.
The December afternoon was cold—not much above zero. Weather of that kind was most unusual in a region so far south. The sky was gray. Now and then a few big snow-flakes came silently down to join the white brotherhood that had already fallen a foot deep on the level and more than two feet deep in the drifts.
The shrubs about the yard looked like snow hillocks; the round bushes were cone-shaped, the branching ones were wreathed. Not a berry or seed-vessel or grass-spear or weed-tuft was anywhere visible.
In these bleak surroundings, a valiant and energetic gentleman in the scarlet cassock and biretta of a cardinal—a cardinal with wings and beak and feathers, you understand—was darting from point to point of the big evergreen, from apex to branch, from branch to apex, a gorgeous splash of color against the clear green of the boughs and the blue-white of the snow.