"That's what," Simeon said, "it's a spendin' sham, from edge to edge."

Abel Ames was silent. The three skirted the flower beds and came out on
the level sweep of turf before the house that was no house in the
darkness, save that they remembered how it looked: a square, smoked
thing, with a beard of dead creepers and white shades lidded over its
never-lighted windows--a fit home for this man least-liked of the three
hundred neighbours who made Old Trail Town. He touched the elbows of the
other two men as they walked in the dark, but he rarely touched any
human being. And now Abel Ames suddenly put his hand down on that of
Ebenezer, where it lay in the crook of Abel's elbow.

"What you got there?" he asked.

"Nothing much," Ebenezer answered, irritably again. "It's an old glass.
I was looking over some rubbish, and I found it--over back. It's a field
glass."

"What you got a field glass out in the dark for?" Abel demanded.

"I used to fool with it some when I was a little shaver," Ebenezer said.
He put the glass in Abel's hand. "On the sky," he added.

Abel lifted the glass and turned it on the heavens. There, above the
little side lawn, the firmament had unclothed itself of branches and lay
in a glorious nakedness to three horizons.

"Thunder," Abel said, "look at 'em look."

Sweeping the field with the lens, Abel spoke meanwhile.

"Seems as if I'd kind of miss all the fuss in the store around
Christmas," he said,--"the extra rush and the trimming up and all."

"Abel'll miss lavishin' his store with cut paper, I guess," said Simeon;
"he dotes on tassels."

"Last year," Abel went on, not lowering the glass, "I had a little kid
come in the store Christmas Eve, that I'd never see before. He ask' me
if he could get warm--and he set down on the edge of a chair by the
stove, and he took in everything in the place. I ask' him his name, and
he just smiled. I ask' him if he was glad it was Christmas, and he says,
Was I. I was goin' to give him some cough drops, but when I come back
from waiting on somebody he was gone. I never could find out who he was,
nor see anybody that saw him. I thought mebbe this Christmas he'd come
back. Lord, don't it look like a pasture of buttercups up there? Here,
Simeon."

Simeon, talking, took the glass and lifted it to the stars.

"Cut paper doin's is all very well," he said, "but the worst nightmare
of the year to the stores is Christmas. I always think it's come to be
'Peace on