the case with the
very poor, they sustained only the inevitable natural relations to
their elders. There were no tender intimacies. They were really as
wild as young rabbits. If we met one in the road by chance and he did
not take literally to his heels, we could see him running in his
spirit. We discovered that none of them had ever even heard of Santa
Claus, although most of them confessed to a reluctant biblical
acquaintance with Adam and Eve.

The thought of little children passing through the Christmas season
without some kind of confectionery faith in the old Saint took hold of
William's bereaved paternal instinct. He did not mind their being
bare-footed in the cold winter weather, but to be so desolate of faith
as never to have hoped even in Santa Claus moved him to desperation. A
week before Christmas he visited more than a score of families and
carried the news with him to every child he could find in the mountains
that there was a Santa Claus, and that Santa had discovered them and
would surely bring something to them if they hung up their stockings.
He enlarged, out of all proportion to his financial capacity, upon the
generosity of the coming Saint. But when you have never had anything
good in your stocking, it is hard to conceive of it in advance; so the
children received his confidences with apathy and silence.

Never, even at the end of a conference year, have I seen William so
industrious and so much the mendicant. He persecuted the merchants in
the village for gifts for his children. He had old women, who had not
thought a frivolous thought in fifty years, teetering over dressing
doll babies. He shamed the stingiest man in the town into giving him a
flour sack full of the most disgraceful-looking candy I ever saw.

"William!" I exclaimed, when he brought home this last trophy, "you
will kill them."

"But," he replied, "for one little hour they will be happy and the next
time I tell them anything, though it should be compound Scriptures,
they will believe me."

The distribution of gifts was made very secretly some days beforehand.
We climbed mountain roads to little brown cabins in all directions,
leaving mysterious bags and parcels with lonesome-looking mother-women.
In one cabin, on top of what was known as Crow's Mountain, we found a
very handsome healthy boy, four months old, clad in a stocking leg and
the sleeve of an old coat, that had been cunningly cut and sewed to fit
him as clos