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قراءة كتاب A Little Book of Christmas
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A LITTLE BOOK
OF CHRISTMAS
"What are you doing?" he asked, drawing near.Frontispiece. See page 69.
A LITTLE BOOK OF
CHRISTMAS
BY
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ARTHUR E. BECHER
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1912
Copyright, 1912,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved
Published, September, 1912
THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. SIMONDS & CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.
CONTENTS
| PAGE | |
|---|---|
| The Conversion of Hetherington | 5 |
| The Child Who Had Everything But— | 47 |
| Santa Claus and Little Billee | 87 |
| The House of the Seven Santas | 129 |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| "What are you doing?" he asked, drawing near | Frontispiece |
| She stood with her eyes popping out of her head | PAGE 39 |
| He thought it very strange that Santa Claus' hand should be so red and cold and rough | 91 |
| One by one the prisoners of the night dropped in surreptitiously | 155 |
A TOAST TO SANTA CLAUS
Believe in Santa Claus,
And spite of all remonstrance won't
Yield up to logic's laws,
And see in things that lie about
The proof by no means dim,
I straightway cut that fellow out,
And don't believe in him.
Along life's busy way.
We find him in the very air
We breathe day after day—
Where courtesy and kindliness
And love are joined together,
To give to sorrow and distress
A touch of sunny weather.
Beneath the mistletoe,
A-sparkling as the star-lit skies
All golden in their glow.
We find him in the pressure of
The hand of sympathy,
And where there's any thought of love
He's mighty sure to be.
The best bet of them all,
Who never fails to do his part
In life's high festival;
The worthy bearer of the crown
With which we top the Saint.
A bumper to his health, and down
With them that say he ain't!
THE CONVERSION OF HETHERINGTON
I
HETHERINGTON wasn't half a bad sort of a fellow, but he had his peculiarities, most of which were the natural defects of a lack of imagination. He didn't believe in ghosts, or Santa Claus, or any of the thousands of other things that he hadn't seen with his own eyes, and as he walked home that rather chilly afternoon just before Christmas and found nearly every corner of the highway decorated with bogus Saints, wearing the shoddy regalia of Kris-Kringle, the sight made him a trifle irritable. He had had a fairly good luncheon that day, one indeed that ought to have mellowed his disposition materially, but which somehow or other had not so resulted. In fact, Hetherington was in a state of raspy petulance that boded ill for his digestion, and when he had reached the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, the constant iteration and reiteration of these shivering figures of the god of the Yule had got on his nerves to such an extent as to make him aggressively quarrelsome. He had controlled the asperities of his soul tolerably well on the way uptown, but the remark of a small child on the highway, made to a hurrying mother, as they passed a stalwart-looking replica of the idol of his Christmas dreams, banging away on a tambourine to attract attention to the iron pot before him, placed there to catch the pennies of the charitably inclined wayfarer—"Oh, mar, there's Sandy Claus now!"—was too much for him.
"Tush! Nonsense!" ejaculated Hetherington, glowering at the shivering figure in the turkey-red robe. "The idea of filling children's minds up with such balderdash! Santa Claus, indeed! There isn't a genuine Santa Claus in the whole bogus