Not even a mouse....
Well, that was not not surprising. Obviously, all the creatures who might otherwise have been stirring about the house on the night before Christmas were crowding and jostling each other in department stores, buying useless presents for people they didn’t like. Alice thought it odd that this hadn’t occurred to her before. It made the beginning of the poem quite clear.
The Santa Claus at the Emporium was entirely surrounded by children. Entirely surrounded? Why not? The schoolroom definition of an island is authority for it: “An island is a body of land entirely surrounded by water.” Sticklers for accuracy will have it that the “entirely” is extraneous. If, they say, if he—or it—that is, Santa Claus or the island—is surrounded by anything (whether water or children), he—or it—is surrounded, and that is all there is to it. Not “entirely surrounded”; just surrounded. Happily, Alice knew nothing of this. As for us, we are nothing if not independent, and care nothing for grammarians—nothing at all. The Santa Claus at the Emporium was entirely surrounded by children, just like all his duplicates, and, in the midst of an alarming racket, was writing long lists of juvenile wants in a big bookkeeper’s ledger. The big bookkeeper was nowhere about, and so the old fellow went right ahead, just as if it had been his own ledger, and filled as many columns as a child wished, in the most amiable manner in the world. He was the nicest Santa Claus Alice had yet seen.
He did not immediately notice Alice, who was neither larger nor smaller than most of the other children shouting around him; but when he did notice her he liked her right away. He liked the old-fashioned way of her, and her last century clothes, and from the way she looked at him he was sure that she, at least, believed in him, and wasn’t dropping in just to see how much she could get out of him. And then he hurried, so that he could finish quickly with the others and get around to Alice. It wasn’t very long until there she was—right up beside him, with his dear old whiskers tickling her shell-like ears (one of them, anyway), and his pen poised over a perfectly blank page, ready to write down anything that Alice asked him to. And his voice, too, was very pleasant.
“Now,” said this kindly old saint, adjusting his eyebrows with some care, for they were slightly moth-eaten and appeared to be falling off—and no wonder, either, for some hundreds of boys and girls had been leaning against them all day—“Now,” said this nice old man, “what do you wish me to bring you for Christmas, little Golden-hair?”
There was something charming about the way he emphasized the you that put Alice at ease immediately. So she told him all about the lovely doll, and the darling kitten, and the sweet bird she wanted, and had been wanting for a long time, and all about the books she needed with which to catch up on the world. For she had been locked away for so long that she felt a bit out of date, and such phrases as “League of Nations” and “Maple Nut Sundae” simply meant nothing to her, while they were the common property of every other girl and boy in the land.
The good-natured old soul wrote them all down very carefully, and then kissed Alice just as she had expected he would. He promised faithfully to deliver every one of her orders, in person, and warned her about seeing that the hearth fire was extinguished before midnight.
“Because promptly at midnight,” he said, “I shall come down the chimley.”
Alice giggled at that.
“You mean the chimney, don’t you?” she asked.