be no disenchantment they shouted and laughed crazily.  There followed a scramble from the beds and a swift return from the cold, each bearing such of the priceless bits as had lain nearest.  And while these were fondled or shot or blown upon or tasted or wound up, each according to its wonderful nature, they looked farther afield seeing other and ever new packages bulk mysteriously into the growing light; bundles quickening before their eyes with every delight to be imagined of a Saint with epicurean tastes and prodigal habits—­bundles that looked as if a mere twitch at the cord would expose their hidden charms.

The littler boy now wore a unique fur cap that let down to cover the neck and face, with openings wonderfully contrived for the eyes, nose and mouth—­an easy triumph, surely, over the deadliest cold known to man.  In one hand he flourished a brass-handled knife with both of its blades open; with the other he clasped a striped trumpet, into the china mouthpiece of which he had blown the shreds of a caramel, not meaning to; and here he was made to forget these trifles by discovering at the farther side of the room a veritable rocking-horse, a creature that looked not only magnificently willing, but superbly untamable, with a white mane and tail of celestial flow, with alert, pointed ears of maroon leather nailed nicely to the right spot.  At this marvel he stared in that silence which is the highest power of joy:  a presentiment had been his that such a horse, curveting on blue rockers, would be found on this very morning.  Two days before had he in an absent moment beheld a vision of this horse poised near the door of the attic; but when he ran to make report of it below, thinking to astound people by his power of insight, Clytemnestra, bidding him wait in the kitchen where she was baking, had hurried to the spot and found only some rolls of blue cambric.  She had rather shamed him for giving her such a start.  A few rolls of shiny blue cambric against a white wall did not, she assured him, make a rocking-horse; and, what was more, they never would.  Now the vision came back with a significance that set him all a-thrill.  Next time Clytie would pay attention to him.  He laughed to think of her confusion now.

But here again, at the very zenith of a shout, was he frozen to silence by a vision—­this time one too obviously of no ponderable fabric.  There in the corner, almost at his hand, seemed to be a thing that he had dreamed of possessing only after he entered Heaven—­a candy cane:  one of fearful length, thick of girth, vast of crook, and wide in the spiral stripe that seemed to run a living flame before his ravished eyes, beginning at the bottom and winding around and around the whole dizzy height.  Fearfully in nerve-braced silence he leaned far out of his bed to bring against this amazing apparition one cool, impartial forefinger of skeptic research.  It did not vanish; it resisted his touch.  Then his heart fainted with rapture, for he knew the unimagined had become history.