Page 81 - Among the camps, or, Young people's stories of the war

ing him “ gu ess” about it. Christmas E v e she went over to
the old doctors, and whilst she made him shut his eyes, hung
up his stocking herself, into which she poked a new pair of
very queer-shaped yarn socks, a little black in some places
from her little hands, for they were just done, and there had

not been time to wash them. She consulted the old doctor
to know if he really— really, " now, really"—-thought Santa
Claus would bring her a doll “ through the w a r; '1 but she
could only get a Lfperhaps” out of him, for he said he
had not heard from Harry.

It was about ten o'clock that night when the old doctor
came home from his round of visits, and opening his old
secretary, took out a long thin bundle wrapped in paper,
and slipping it into his pocket, went out again into the snow
which was falling. Old Limpid, the doctor's man, had taken

Slouch to the stable, so the old doctor walked, stumbling
around through the dark by the gate, thinking with a sigh
of his boy Harry, who would just have vaulted over the
palings, and who was that night sleeping in the snow some­

where. However, he smiled when he put the bundle into
Nancy Pansy’s long stocking, and he smiled again when he
put his old worn boots to the fire and warmed his feet.
But when Nancy Pansy slipped next morning through her
" little doctor’s-gate/ 1 as she called her hole in the fence, and
burst into his room before he was out of bed, to show him

with dancing eyes what Santa Claus had brought her. and
announced that she had “ named her "H arry,' all herself,”