y babies in red flannel
nightgowns buttoned up the back who had pillow fights in honor of the
day and took turns in playing on a barrel organ, those that were strong
and tall enough. In the next ward another baby in white was dying--
Its mother was a coster girl, seventeen years old, with a big hat and
plumes like those the flower girls wear at Piccadilly Circus. The baby
was yellow like old ivory and its teeth and gums were blue and it died
while we were watching it. The mother girl was drinking tea and crying
into it out of red swollen eyes, and twenty feet off one of the red
nightgowned kids was playing "Louisiana Lou" on the barrel organ. The
nurse put the baby's arms under the sheets and then pulled one up over
its face and took the teacup away from the mother who didn't see what
had happened and I came away while three young nurses were comforting
the girl. Most of the nurses were very beautiful, and I neglected my
duties as Santa Claus to talk to them. They would stop talking to get
down on their knees and dust up the floor, which was most embarrassing,
you couldn't very well ask to be let to help. There was one coster who
had his broken leg in a cage which moved with the leg no matter how
much he tossed. He was like the man "who sat in jail without his
boots, admiring how the world was made," he spent all his waking hours
in wrapt admiration of the cage-- He said to me "I've been here a
fortnight now, come Monday, and I can't break my leg no how. Yer can't
do it, that's all-- Yer can twist, and kick, and toss, and it don't do
no good. Yer jest can't do it-- Now you take notice." Then he would
kick violently and the cage would run around on trolleys and keep the
broken limb straight. "See!" he would exclaim, "Wot did I tell you--
Its no use of trying, yer just can't do it. 'ere I've been ten days a
trying and it can't be done."

We had a very fine Christmas dinner just Ethel, the McCarthy's and I.
Fanny, tell Charles, brought in the plum pudding with a sprig of holly
in it and blazing, and after dinner I read them the Jackall-- About
eleven I started to take Ethel to Miss Terry's, who lives miles beyond
Kensington. There was a light fog. I said that all sorts of things
ought to happen in a fog but that no one ever did have adventures
nowadays. At that we rode straight into a bank of fog that makes those
on the fishing banks look like Spring sunshine. You could not see the
houses, nor the street,