"All this time, Aunt Elinor, you haven't told us what made the cars go, and what stops them," said Edith, thoughtfully.
"What a forgetful aunty I am! This is the way it is done. Harry Thornton wants to buy a dog; he has a fifty-cent piece; he stops at a toy counter over which is marked Station D, and selects a nice black-and-tan—"
"No, a Newfoundland, aunty."
"Well, a Newfoundland. He hands fifty cents to the young woman clerk. What does she do? She takes the car down off the track, using a long-handled contrivance like a fork to do it. She places Mr. Doggy—Carlo, if you please—in the lower wire cage, the money and her cash-book in the top car; then places the car and its baggage on the down-town track, and away it rushes. You see, one end of the track is higher than the other, making a gentle descent, down which the little car glides. A young lad hands Mr. Carlo over to the wrapping clerk, and in a second or two, all wrapped from top to toe in tissue-paper, he makes his appearance in car D, bound on the up-town track for Station D. He makes the trip in ten seconds."
"But what makes him stop just at Station D?" inquires Harry.
"A small steel peg under the car, called a brake, is fixed just where it will fit in a notch on the steel road, and every station car is provided with one."
"I know it now," exclaimed Edith. "It was the benevolent gentleman who said in the beginning of your story that the cash boys and girls ought to have been in bed hours ago. He was the one who invented it—the railroad, I mean. Who was he, aunty?"
"I am sorry I can not tell you his name; but he is a very bashful person," replied Aunt Elinor.
"I'll tell you who it is," shouted Harry, with an air of triumph: "it's old Santa Claus. Hurrah for old Santa Claus!"
"Some one's Santa Claus, undoubtedly, little man; but whose?—that is the question."