They called her Moll, she said, but that was not her real name, which she had forgotten.
“How would you like to be called ‘Agnes’?” said Claus, his old eyes growing misty over some long-buried memory.
“Oh, that’s a nice name, Santa Claus! And I’m so sleepy!”
The old housekeeper was thereupon roused from her slumbers in a distant corner of the house, and the child put to bed in her own room in a couch hastily improvised from chairs and blankets.
Next morning Old Claus, feeling very much more like Young Claus than he had for years, put an end to the wonderful stories flying about the neighborhood by acknowledging his own agency in little Agnes’ disappearance. An arrangement was easily made with the dissipated woman who, it seemed, had taken charge of the child and ill-used her cruelly since her mother’s death. The proper papers having been drawn, Mr. Jonathan Claus became the legal guardian of the little waif, with whom he shortly afterward removed to a more cheerful quarter of the city.
Agnes lost all her Christmas presents, to be sure, for not one of them ever could be found—except the sheep which had brought her good fortune, and who was allowed to baa to his heart’s content that Christmas day; but Santa Claus (as she persisted in calling her deliverer) replaced them, with interest.
That is the way Old Claus found his treasure; not only little Agnes, though she soon became dearer to him than all his wealth, but that most precious of treasures, Love.
