seeing other and ever new packages bulk mysteriously into
the growing light; bundles quickening before their eyes with every delight
to be imagined of a Saint with epicurean tastes and prodigal
habits--bundles that looked as if a mere twitch at the cord would expose
their hidden charms.

The littler boy now wore a unique fur cap that let down to cover the neck
and face, with openings wonderfully contrived for the eyes, nose and
mouth--an easy triumph, surely, over the deadliest cold known to man. In
one hand he flourished a brass-handled knife with both of its blades open;
with the other he clasped a striped trumpet, into the china mouthpiece of
which he had blown the shreds of a caramel, not meaning to; and here he
was made to forget these trifles by discovering at the farther side of the
room a veritable rocking-horse, a creature that looked not only
magnificently willing, but superbly untamable, with a white mane and tail
of celestial flow, with alert, pointed ears of maroon leather nailed
nicely to the right spot. At this marvel he stared in that silence which
is the highest power of joy: a presentiment had been his that such a
horse, curveting on blue rockers, would be found on this very morning. Two
days before had he in an absent moment beheld a vision of this horse
poised near the door of the attic; but when he ran to make report of it
below, thinking to astound people by his power of insight, Clytemnestra,
bidding him wait in the kitchen where she was baking, had hurried to the
spot and found only some rolls of blue cambric. She had rather shamed him
for giving her such a start. A few rolls of shiny blue cambric against a
white wall did not, she assured him, make a rocking-horse; and, what was
more, they never would. Now the vision came back with a significance that
set him all a-thrill. Next time Clytie would pay attention to him. He
laughed to think of her confusion now.

But here again, at the very zenith of a shout, was he frozen to silence by
a vision--this time one too obviously of no ponderable fabric. There in
the corner, almost at his hand, seemed to be a thing that he had dreamed
of possessing only after he entered Heaven--a candy cane: one of fearful
length, thick of girth, vast of crook, and wide in the spiral stripe that
seemed to run a living flame before his ravished eyes, beginning at the
bottom and winding around and around the whole dizzy height. Fearfully in
nerve-braced silence he leaned fa