Briskly Dorothy packed the toys into the suit-case with much daintily efficient manipulation of tissue-paper. Then she put on a small, closely fitting-but becoming-hat, turned an extravagantly high fur collar up about her ears, caught up her muff in one hand and the suitcase in the other, and went down to the street level and out into the bright cold

air.

Snowflakes had been tapping busily against her panes for the last hour, but she had been too busy to think about it. Although it was barely five o'clock, the thickly falling snow had stippled the familiar narrow defile into a blurred mystery where every window twinkled of illimitable human life within.

For all of Dorothy's Christmas-CarolArabian Midwinter Night's Dream mood she was a modernized-as well as an enormously beautified-Scrooge, for her Christmas-Eve pilgrimage was directed, not by a Christmas Angel or Vision of Past or Future Christmases, but by a list in her smart hand-bag secured from a badgered charity-worker, and by prosaic connections between Subway and "L" and cross-town transportation. Therefore it was dusk before she reached the first address on her list, the home of a Mrs. McGregor, solemnly guaranteed by the fatigued charityworker to be authentically needy, with three children of proper Christmaspresent age, one of them a girl who was ideally fitted to be the mother of Penel

ope.

The tenement entrance hall was fairly clean, but its bareness was depressing; and the stale and unwholesome odors of cooking, never-ending and never aired, that loaded the air were the very breath of wretchedness.

When the door of the flat opened Dorothy had a moment of surprise. The woman who stood there was a comfort

able-looking person. She had a flushed look of excitement on her face, and she waited absent-mindedly and a little impatiently for Dorothy to announce her errand. Her obvious satisfaction with circumstances was a bit disconcerting to her caller; that was not what Dorothy had been led to expect at Christmas-time from a poor widow with three children to support on the wages of a charwoman.

"Mrs. McGregor is utterly discouraged," the charity-worker's note had said. Some tactful instinct made Dorothy hesitate to disclose her errand. In her indecision she brought out the list.

"Won't you come inside where the light is better?" urged the woman, smiling cheerily. "That is, if you don't mind things being a bit upset. The children are excited over Christmas."

Wondering, Dorothy followed her in. At first she saw nothing but the tiny candles on a little Christmas tree; and it was the aromatic deliciousness of pine she breathed that seemed to awaken very much the same kind of pleasant madness as anything she could dream of her own childhood.

About the foot of the tree two boys were prancing and darting and twisting in what would have been a fearful spasm in an adult, but was undoubtedly expressive of joy in the youngsters. The floor was a perilous network of miniature railway tracks, relay-stations, round-house, switches; wheels that turned, mills that poured wheat into buckets; footballs, baseball bats, sleds-nothing so delirious had Dorothy seen since her eleventhhour dive into the last departmentstore, and the youngsters there were pale, anemic understudies to these sons of piteous poverty.

The one calm spot in the room, and the one comfortable chair, were occupied by two figures that made Dorothy rub her eyes with a sense of having stepped into some impossible sentimental Dickensy story. For a red-faced man, bluff but unmistakably prosperous, held a little girl upon his knee. His weatherbeaten face was all aglow with complacent satisfaction-and with something more tender when his eyes rested on the child. And well he might so look at her, for the little girl was so incredible a realization of all that poets and romancers have dreamed about childhood that Dorothy almost doubted if she could be real. She was not the red-cheeked, sturdy child that child-culture specialists write about. It was a dainty little maiden with a cloud of pale, spun-gold hair that made the kind of little frock it flowed over a negligible factor in the picture; her blue eyes were wells of childish mystery; a

faint, delicious, wild-rose pink was in her cheeks; and her arms so firmly clasped an enormous overdressed doll that no one present, surely, would have ventured to unlock them. And that whole sweet little presence shone, even while the flush of excitement lingered, with deep, placid, unutterable joy.

How to explain the scene? Dorothy tore her eyes from the child long enough to confront the smiling woman. Puzzled as she was, she yet knew enough to realize that she couldn't offer her gifts here. She held her list up to get a better light. They must not guess her errand. The merciful guile that rises automatically in all loving souls showed her the way out:

"Oh-there must be some mistake. You are not Mrs. O'Hara?" She substituted the next name on her list. She was thinking: "What does this mean? This prodigal, sumptuous Christmas! And who is that red-faced man? They said she was a widow. Has-?"

"No, I'm Mrs. McGregor. And this is my brother. He has come back, and I hadn't heard from him for years and thought him dead long ago.' Mrs. McGregor simply couldn't restrain the chanting of her good fortune. It was bursting from her. And then, people always told Dorothy things. 'And he has made his fortune mining in Alaskaand he's going to take care of usShe was weeping.

Dorothy blinked. Of all the stale, impossible Christmas romances—a returned rich brother at Christmas-time and his fortune made in mining, in Alaska a plot about twenty years superannuated. She turned her skeptical eyes upon the woman.

But the blessed ease and comfort, the release from hourly anxiety, that had wiped out every line but those expressing happiness from Mrs. McGregor's face were real. Dorothy couldn't challenge them. This thing had happened. Nothing remained but to be glad with them.

And that no face was more admirably adapted to do than Dorothy's. And what her face couldn't express her voice could with the tremor that broke its gladness into something more warmly human. Mrs. McGregor, with the rather selfsatisfied uncle who returned to play his

Christmas-romance rôle of making everything comfortable with the sister whom he had forgotten in the scramble of goldgetting, found that his contentment was touched with something rarer in the glow of her sympathy. Even the little princess on the red-faced uncle's knee felt something sweet pierce through to that rapt place where she sat secure in the possession of her realized dream, and she descended from her throne, the huge, befrilled doll still pressed to her, to offer a confiding little hand to the unexpected guest. The boys-who expects anything but noise of boys at Christmas-time, anyway?-only paused long enough to shout some unintelligible boast about the speed of the train they were operating.

Yet when Dorothy found herself outside, the door shut on all that happiness, the unopened suit-case in her hand, there was one moment when she wasn't happy. She had an absurd sense of rebuff, of not being wanted.

"I would have loved to have had it Penelope that the little darling looked that way about. Penelope is really much prettier even if she isn't so overwhelmingly expensive." Almost as soon as she thought this she was able to laugh at herself for feeling so much like a jealous mother. "Now which will be the next place?"

While she had been in the house it had grown quite dark. Dorothy's smartly shod little feet crunched gaily against the crisp snow or plowed through some feathery softness that had escaped trampling; the snow pricked at her cheeks until they blazed and clung to her brown lashes until she had to wink fast to see.

After a detour to a little up-town restaurant for something to eat, she found herself near the third address on her list. "Wrench" was the name. She read again the brief note. Mrs. Wrench, it seemed, was afflicted with a drunken husband. There were children; there had been illness. "Be careful," the charity-worker had added. "Proud. Good stock."

This tenement was a shade worse than the other. When the door was opened, to Dorothy's surprise, it was a man and not a woman who stood there. He had a thin, nervous, ascetic face, and when

she asked for Mrs. Wrench he conducted her inside with perfect courtesy.

There were no children in the room that opened out of the tiny entry, although there were traces of their recent presence. It was a crowded little place, as Dorothy had expected it to be, evidently the general living-room, kitchen, dining-room, with the inevitable cot to show that it was a bedroom, too, although there was a nondescript dark covering over it. But the fact that the bed was so disguised and that an old bureau, doing duty as a sideboard, had been turned so as to screen the coal-oil stove and the sink, revealed a desire to maintain some of the forms of decent living that reminded Dorothy again of the charity-worker's laconic statement, "Good stock."

A woman's figure straightened at her approach. In one hand she held a tackhammer; in the other a child's long black stocking dangled. And then Dorothy saw that on one side of the room was a cheap wooden mantelshelf above a stovepipe hole that showed that once a stove had been there. From the shelf three black stockings of assorted sizes hung. The woman had been interrupted in the act of tacking up the fourth.

There was no other hint of Christmas in the room but that and the little branch of holly on top of the shelf. But so magical is the power of association that all the joys of past Christmases streamed from those lank, knobby, distorted lengths with their illogical bulges and lanknesses just where no human leg could possibly bulge or so stretch loose lengths of cotton. From one of the From one of the stockings smiled the vacuous countenance of a little doll. With a glad impulse Dorothy's hand went to the lock of her suit-case.

"That pathetic cheap little toy with its poor little mat of yellow jute for hair! How overjoyed that child will be when she sees Penelope!" she thought, exultantly. "And think of her when she sees all the clothes!"

"Won't you sit down?" The sound of the man's voice reminded her of his presence. She looked at him with a vague sense that a gentleman didn't fit into the picture. There was pride in the woman's eyes as she watched him pull

forward a broken chair for the guest with a sort of automatic courtesy.

"This is my husband," she said, and her voice throbbed as if with pride and joy that cannot yet trust itself. "Hehe has just recovered from an illness. He has been-back at work just a few days."

Then all at once the man's face went red, and Dorothy understood what the scene meant, what renewed stirring of happiness in the heart of this sad little Mrs. Wrench, what piteous hope of regeneration of that "drunken husband" of whom the charity-worker had made a note. The hope might last for a day or for a lifetime God grant it might be for a lifetime!

"And with the first glimmer of itpoor souls! oh, poor souls!-they have stolen out, with what they could save from a day's wages perhaps, their first thought to make Christmas for their children. It's a sign to them, a pledge to him those poor little toys, the bit of candy. It would be an insult to give them these things I have brought. It would turn this ritual of theirs into a mockery if I let them know some one had brought them charity. I can't even let them see my things-that poor little girl can never see Penelope- But couldn't I? No, it might throw that poor harried man back into the pit if his one poor endeavor were spoiled. might have done such frightful harm."

I

There was again the need of an explanation. It makes no difference what affectionate invention Dorothy contrived, but it had taken so long to go through this experience and it consumed so much time to reach the third and last address on her list that a glance. at her wrist showed her it was nearly ten o clock.

She was not kept waiting. As if she were expected the door was opened immediately. A blare of light and heat came out at her that was almost overpowering.

The basement room might once have been the servants' hall of a pretentious old residence. There was an old-fashioned base-burner stove in red-hot activity. A mob of nondescript humanity seemed to be in furious possession. The mob soon resolved itself into a number of

hilarious persons ranged on either side of an extraordinary, bumpy, uneven structure that ran the length of the room. It was evidently formed by assembling tables of various sizes, barrels, boxes, and uniting them by the simple expedient of spreading sheet table-covers, coverlids anything white-over them. Large women were bouncing in and out of the room carrying plates and platters; children were scattered over the place, under feet, in corners, spinning tops, nursing dolls, pitching ball, all screaming at the top of their lungs and all smeared from head to feet with candy in which red alternated with rich streaks of chocolate.

A trifle overpowered, but inured by this time to extraordinary incidents, Dorothy halted.

"Mrs. O'Hara?" she asked, weakly. The largest of the red-faced women surrendered the bowl of rich brown gravy she was carrying and placed herself before the girl.

"Is it Nora O'Hara ye're askin' for? It's that same I am and phwat can I do for yez?" Her jovial voice was as rich as the fragrance of roasted turkey that pervaded the place.

Again instinct warned Dorothy to be cautious. The charity-worker had assured her that this was a most pitiable case a widow with five children all living in two basement rooms, none of the children old enough to work, all of them underfed, almost starving, without fuel for a week at a time, subsisting with difficulty on the woman's earnings as a laundress.

"Won't ye come in and sit down at th' table? It's afther entertaining a few frinds I am at dinner, and nobody shall go away hungry from my table to-night. 'Tis welcome ye ar-r-re as flowers in May avin if I niver laid my two eyes on yez before. It's two turkeys they've sint me in th' day instid of the wan that the Charity usually sinds, and all the trimmin's "

This was a little disconcerting, and Dorothy asked, primly:

"But couldn't you have put one turkey by for future use? I'm-I'm sure if I had two turkeys I should feel that I must live on them for a whole week." The instant she had said it she hated herself for a prig and a cad. But Mrs. O'Hara was able to defend herself against the most case-hardened moralist.

"It's not me nature to begrudge a bit of food to me frinds," the lady said, loftily. "And it's worth a dale to anny wan that's hospitaybel to be able to dischar-r-rge y'r social obligayshuns. We're put on this earth to enj'y oursilves we ar-r-re, avin if sometimes it's not able to do it we ar-r-re. Avin if a turkey's sint by the Charity it's mighty good atin'. Whin we have turkey is th' toime to enj'y it and have others do th' same. There's times enough we must go without."

"Don't the children like turkey, too?" Dorothy asked, hastily, trying not to show how thoroughly she agreed with these unorthodox sentiments.

"Whin they can have candy? Not much. Th' Charity didn't f'rgit th' candy this year, and they sint toys, too. 'Tis some new person they must have there. It's little th' childer care f'r turkey whin they can have all the candy they want. And thin, that laves that much more for thim that doesn't howld so much by th' candy by rayson av their teeth. What ar-r-re we given good things for if it's not to make people happy? And av the candy makes the childer sick, there's always medicine to be had at th' dispensary.' She pulled one of the children to her and pushed the tangled hair out of her eyes. "Is it happy ye ar-r-re th' blissid Christmas Day, mavourneen? There's not wan other blissid thing in the wor-r-rld mother wants as much.”

The half-hour-half-past ten it was— struck from one of the down-town churches near by as Dorothy found herself outside. To the hospitable Mrs. O'Hara it had not occurred to wonder why the visitor should have been there at all. All at once Dorothy stopped short with a sudden sense of her predicament.

"I couldn't have given Penelope to them, now could I?" she asked herself.

Some time later she found herself, in growing confusion, halting to look at some toys in a window of a little shop not far from Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. A mellow-toned churchbell was chiming eleven. Her feet had begun to ache with the cold. She was more forlorn than she ever remembered having been. In the shelter of the shop window she wiped her eyes and whimpered a moment to herself. Suddenly she put her handkerchief back in her hand-bag with a jerk. A man was trying the shop door. The brilliant lights within the store had evidently deceived him. He turned away impatiently.

Something in his evident disappointment made a bond with him in Dorothy's heart. She would not have spoken to him, but he was a middle-aged man with respectability stamped all over him -not exactly a gentleman, perhaps, but- Somehow the swiftly falling snow seemed to curtain them off from the rest of the world and signify he was the person to be asked.

"Do you know any poor little girl who hasn't any one to give her Christmas presents?" Dorothy had spoken before she knew she was going to, and she felt foolish the moment she had said the words. But surely if any one would know this man would. She had never seen a more fatherly looking person-a plain, simple man and so respectable.