all
thinking about it, too. Every one of them knew what he knew.... Just
for a breath he saw the little street as it was: an entity. Then the
sight closed, but through him ran again that sense of keener being, so
poignant that now, as his veins flowed with it, something deeper within
him almost answered.

He wheeled impatiently from where he stood. He wanted to do something.
At the end of the street he could see them crossing under the light, on
their way to Mary Chavah's. Abel and Simeon might stop for him ... but
how could he go there, among the folk whom he had virtually denied their
Christmas? What would they have to say to him? Yet what they should say
would, after all, matter nothing to him ... and perhaps he would hear
them say something about Bruce and Jenny. Still, he had nothing to take
there, as Abel had suggested. What had he that a boy would want to have?
Unless....

He thought for a moment. Then he crossed the street to what had been his
house. He went in, seeing again the hallway and stair, red-carpeted, and
the door opened into the lamplit room beyond. He found and lighted an
end of candle that he knew, and made his way up the stair. There he set
the candle down and lowered the ladder that led to the loft.

In the loft, a gust of wind from the skylight blew out the flame of his
little wick. In the darkness, the broken panes above his head looked
down on him like a face, and that face the sky, thousand-eyed. He
mounted a box, pushed up the frame, and put out his head. The sky lay
near. The little town showed, heaped roofs and lifting smoke, and here
and there a light. Sparkling in their midst was the light before the
Town Hall, like an eye guarding something and answering to the light
before his factory and to the other light before the station, where the
world went by. High over all, climbing the east, came Capella, and
seemed to be standing above the village.

As he looked, the need to express what he felt beset Ebenezer.

"Quite a little town," he thought, "quite a little town."

He closed the glass, and groped in the darkness to where the roof,
sloping sharply, met the door. There he touched an edge of something
that swayed, and he laid hold of and drew out that for which he had
come: Malcolm's hobbyhorse.

Downstairs in the hall he set it on the floor, examined it, rocked it
with one finger. The horse returned to its ancient office as if it were
irrevocably ordained to service. Ebenezer, his