The Old Man caught at his sinking figure.
“Tell him,” said Dick, with a weak little laugh—“tell him Sandy Claus has come.”
And even so, bedraggled, ragged, unshaven and unshorn, with one arm hanging helplessly at his side, Santa Claus came to Simpson’s Bar and fell fainting on the first threshold.
The Christmas dawn came slowly after, touching the remoter peaks with the rosy warmth of ineffable love.
And it looked so tenderly on Simpson’s Bar that the whole mountain, as it caught in a generous action, blushed to the skies.
Bret Harte.
THE BREACH OF PROMISE CASE.
AMOS DIXON had not been long gone from the elegant house when Miss Sophia Garr, caparisoned in a jaunty hat and a ready-made cloak, sallied forth on a little business of her own.
She took the nearest way to Montgomery Street, and proceeded almost to the head of that thoroughfare. Ascending a very wide flight of steps, she turned to the right, and went up a narrower flight; turning again to the left, she went up a narrower flight still. Without pausing to take breath, Miss Sophia proceeded, by the help of the skylight, to read the names on a whole army of doors. Making nearly the whole circuit of the long hall, she arrived finally at a door which seemed to meet with her approval, for she nodded her head, knocked, and walked briskly in.