end Miss Sherman, in her Broome Street
cellar,--it is always the attic or the cellar,--would object to Mrs.
Ben Wah's claim to being the only real American in my note-book. She
is from Down East, and says "stun" for stone. In her youth she was
lady's-maid to a general's wife, the recollection of which military
career equally condones the cellar and prevents her holding any sort
of communication with her common neighbors, who add to the offence of
being foreigners the unpardonable one of being mostly men. Eight cats
bear her steady company, and keep alive her starved affections. I
found them on last Christmas eve behind barricaded doors; for the cold
that had locked the water-pipes had brought the neighbors down to the
cellar, where Miss Sherman's cunning had kept them from freezing.
Their tin pans and buckets were even then banging against her door.
"They're a miserable lot," said the old maid, fondling her cats
defiantly; "but let 'em. It's Christmas. Ah!" she added, as one of the
eight stood up in her lap and rubbed its cheek against hers, "they're
innocent. It isn't poor little animals that does the harm. It's men
and women that does it to each other." I don't know whether it was
just philosophy, like Mrs. Ben Wah's, or a glimpse of her story. If
she had one, she kept it for her cats.

In a hundred places all over the city, when Christmas comes, as many
open-air fairs spring suddenly into life. A kind of Gentile Feast of
Tabernacles possesses the tenement districts especially.
Green-embowered booths stand in rows at the curb, and the voice of the
tin trumpet is heard in the land. The common source of all the show is
down by the North River, in the district known as "the Farm." Down
there Santa Claus establishes headquarters early in December and until
past New Year. The broad quay looks then more like a clearing in a
pine forest than a busy section of the metropolis. The steamers
discharge their loads of fir trees at the piers until they stand
stacked mountain-high, with foot-hills of holly and ground-ivy
trailing off toward the land side. An army train of wagons is engaged
in carting them away from early morning till late at night; but the
green forest grows, in spite of it all, until in places it shuts the
shipping out of sight altogether. The air is redolent with the smell
of balsam and pine. After nightfall, when the lights are burning in
the busy market, and the homeward-bound crowds with baskets and heavy
burd