gh-looking man with a flushed face, whom no one
knew, and who stopped on the corner and looked back as one in a dream
and then went east, the way the Captain and his man had gone on their
expedition personating no less exalted a personage than Santa Claus
himself.

That night there was Christmas, indeed, in the rear tenement "near
the gas house," for papa had come home just in time to share in its
cheer. And there was no one who did it with a better will, for the
Christmas evening that began so badly was the luckiest night in his
life. He had the promise of a job on the morrow in his pocket, along
with something to keep the wolf from the door in the holidays. His
hard days were over, and he was at last to have his chance to live an
honest life. And it was the baby's letter to Santa Claus and the baa
sheep that did it all, with the able assistance of the Captain and the
Sergeant. Don't let us forget the Sergeant.

LOST CHILDREN

I am not thinking now of theological dogmas or moral distinctions. I
am considering the matter from the plain every-day standpoint of the
police office. It is not my fault that the one thing that is lost more
persistently than any other in a large city is the very thing you
would imagine to be safest of all in the keeping of its owner. Nor do
I pretend to explain it. It is simply one of the contradictions of
metropolitan life. In twenty years' acquaintance with the police
office, I have seen money, diamonds, coffins, horses, and tubs of
butter brought there and pass into the keeping of the property clerk
as lost or strayed. I remember a whole front stoop, brownstone, with
steps and iron railing all complete, being put up at auction,
unclaimed. But these were mere representatives of a class which as a
whole kept its place and the peace. The children did neither. One
might have been tempted to apply the old inquiry about the pins to
them but for another contradictory circumstance: rather more of them
are found than lost.

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children keeps the
account of the surplus. It has now on its books half a score Jane Does
and twice as many Richard Roes, of whom nothing more will ever be
known than that they were found, which is on the whole, perhaps,
best--for them certainly. The others, the lost, drift from the
tenements and back, a host of thousands year by year. The two I am
thinking of were of these, typical of the maelstrom.

Yette Lubinsky was t