last year. It was now in the juvenile scrap heap, thanks to an
attempt to harness the bit of machinery to the powerful lighting current
in Sid's house, but it had been delight indescribable to swing the
little switch and watch the armature gain momentum until it hummed like
a bee. So the first of his desires ran, "Motor, electric. Batteries,
too."

Last year, Bill and he had built a shaky bob for use on the park
toboggan, only to have a collision with a park water hydrant, used for
flooding the field, and the remains of the sleds had gone to their
respective family woodpiles. So down went, "Sled, coaster, with round
runners."

The descriptive bit was to eliminate any possibility of getting a high,
useless girl's sled, which would go to pieces in less than no time.

As he thought of each article he wrote, "Hockey skates. My old ones are
rusted. A knife. Mine's lost." And last, but not least, "Books, lots of
them."

That exhausted his list of needs. There were a thousand other things
which he knew he wanted if he could only think of them, but the
innumerable boyish desires which had arisen since his birthday in June
had fled, and, try as he would, he could recall none of them. As a last
desperate resort, he scrawled a concluding "Anything else useful," and
signed it, "Your loving nephew, John."

Saturday, an errant breeze from the east veiled the clear starlight of
the early evening as if by magic, and by morning had marshaled long,
heavy rows of slate-hued clouds which drove over the city from the lake.
The temperature, too, rose above the freezing point and gave the only
boy in the Fletcher household a chance to bank the ever-hungry furnace,
and shut off all draughts. He employed his respite in a blissful perusal
of the double-page advertisements in the Sunday paper.

Toys, hundreds of them! The department stores vied with each other in
the profusion of their offerings. Illustrations of "William Tell
Banks--drop penny in bank and Tell shoots apple from son's
head"--mechanical engines which sped around three-foot circles of track
until any human engineer would become dizzy; sleds of every description
from humble ones at fifty cents to long, elaborately enameled speed
kings with spring-steel runners, and games in innumerable variety, made
him read and reread the alluring pages until his eyes ached.

He sighed and looked up dreamily. The moisture-laden clouds from the
east had borne out the newspaper forecast of "