from the depths of teacher's
pocket. Babies are encouraged in these schools, though not originally
included in their plan, as often the one condition upon which the
older children can be reached. Some one has to mind the baby, with all
hands out at work.

The school sings "Santa Lucia" and "Children of the Heavenly King,"
and baby is lulled to sleep.

"Who is this King?" asks the teacher, suddenly, at the end of a verse.
Momentary stupefaction. The little minds are on ice-cream just then;
the lad nearest the door has telegraphed that it is being carried up
in pails. A little fellow on the back seat saves the day. Up goes his
brown fist.

"Well, Vito, who is he?"

"McKinley!" pipes the lad, who remembers the election just past; and
the school adjourns for ice-cream.

It is a sight to see them eat it. In a score of such schools, from the
Hook to Harlem, the sight is enjoyed in Christmas week by the men and
women who, out of their own pockets, reimburse Santa Claus for his
outlay, and count it a joy, as well they may; for their beneficence
sometimes makes the one bright spot in lives that have suffered of all
wrongs the most cruel,--that of being despoiled of their childhood.
Sometimes they are little Bohemians; sometimes the children of refugee
Jews; and again, Italians, or the descendants of the Irish stock of
Hell's Kitchen and Poverty Row; always the poorest, the shabbiest, the
hungriest--the children Santa Claus loves best to find, if any one
will show him the way. Having so much on hand, he has no time, you
see, to look them up himself. That must be done for him; and it is
done. To the teacher in the Sullivan Street school came one little
girl, this last Christmas, with anxious inquiry if it was true that he
came around with toys.

"I hanged my stocking last time," she said, "and he didn't come at
all." In the front house indeed, he left a drum and a doll, but no
message from him reached the rear house in the alley. "Maybe he
couldn't find it," she said soberly. Did the teacher think he would
come if she wrote to him? She had learned to write.

Together they composed a note to Santa Claus, speaking for a doll and
a bell--the bell to play "go to school" with when she was kept home
minding the baby. Lest he should by any chance miss the alley in spite
of directions, little Rosa was invited to hang her stocking, and her
sister's, with the janitor's children's in the school. And lo! on
Christmas morning there