a beautiful
butter-cracker last Christmas, and a lovely gingersnap, and a
delicious rind of cheese, and--and--lots of things? I should be very
ungrateful if I did not believe in Santa Claus, and I certainly shall
not disbelieve in him at the very moment when I am expecting him to
arrive with a bundle of goodies for me.

[Illustration: "But why shouldn't I be merry?" asked the little mauve
mouse. "To-morrow is Christmas, and this is Christmas eve."]

"I once had a little sister," continued the little mauve mouse, "who
did not believe in Santa Claus, and the very thought of the fate that
befell her makes my blood run cold and my whiskers stand on end. She
died before I was born, but my mother has told me all about her.
Perhaps you never saw her; her name was Squeaknibble, and she was in
stature one of those long, low, rangy mice that are seldom found in
well-stocked pantries. Mother says that Squeaknibble took after our
ancestors who came from New England, where the malignant ingenuity of
the people and the ferocity of the cats rendered life precarious
indeed. Squeaknibble seemed to inherit many ancestral traits, the most
conspicuous of which was a disposition to sneer at some of the most
respected dogmas in mousedom. From her very infancy she doubted, for
example, the widely accepted theory that the moon was composed of
green cheese; and this heresy was the first intimation her parents had
of the sceptical turn of her mind. Of course, her parents were vastly
annoyed, for their maturer natures saw that this youthful scepticism
portended serious, if not fatal, consequences. Yet all in vain did the
sagacious couple reason and plead with their headstrong and heretical
child.

"For a long time Squeaknibble would not believe that there was any
such archfiend as a cat; but she came to be convinced to the contrary
one memorable night, on which occasion she lost two inches of her
beautiful tail, and received so terrible a fright that for fully an
hour afterward her little heart beat so violently as to lift her off
her feet and bump her head against the top of our domestic hole. The
cat that deprived my sister of so large a percentage of her vertebral
colophon was the same brindled ogress that nowadays steals ever and
anon into this room, crouches treacherously behind the sofa, and
feigns to be asleep, hoping, forsooth, that some of us, heedless of
her hated presence, will venture within reach of her diabolical claws.
So enra