“Like as not—­but did you ever slide downhill, Santa Claus?  I don’t mean such hills as they hev out here in this new country, but one of them old-fashioned New England hills that was made ’specially for boys to slide down, full of bumpers an’ thank-ye-marms, and about ten times longer comin’ up than it is goin’ down!  The wind blew in our faces and almos’ took our breath away.  ‘Merry Chris’mas to ye, little boys!’ it seemed to say, and it untied our mufflers an’ whirled the snow in our faces, jist as if it was a boy, too, an’ wanted to play with us.  An ol’ crow came flappin’ over us from the cornfield beyond the meadow.  He said:  ‘Caw, caw,’ when he saw my new sled—­I s’pose he’d never seen a red one before.  Otis had a hard time with his sled—­the black one—­an’ he wondered why it wouldn’t go as fast as mine would.  ’Hev you scraped the paint off’n the runners?’ asked Wralsey Goodnow.  ‘Course I hev,’ said Otis; ‘broke my own knife an’ Lute Ingraham’s a-doin’ it, but it don’t seem to make no dif’rence—­the darned ol’ thing won’t go!’ Then, what did Simon Buzzell say but that, like’s not, it was because Otis’s sled’s name was ‘Snow Queen.’  ’Never did see a girl sled that was worth a cent, anyway,’ sez Simon.  Well, now, that jest about broke Otis up in business.  ‘It ain’t a girl sled,’ sez he, ‘and its name ain’t “Snow Queen”!  I’m a-goin’ to call it “Dan’l Webster,” or “Ol’ver Optic,” or “Sheriff Robbins,” or after some other big man!’ An’ the boys plagued him so much about that pesky girl sled that he scratched off the name, an’, as I remember, it did go better after that!

“About the only thing,” continued Joel, “that marred the harmony of the occasion, as the editor of the Hampshire County Phoenix used to say, was the ashes that Deacon Morris Frisbie sprinkled out in front of his house.  He said he wasn’t going to have folks breakin’ their necks jest on account of a lot of frivolous boys that was goin’ to the gallows as fas’ as they could!  Oh, how we hated him! and we’d have snowballed him, too, if we hadn’t been afraid of the constable that lived next door.  But the ashes didn’t bother us much, and every time we slid side-saddle we’d give the ashes a kick, and that sort of scattered ’em.”

The bare thought of this made Santa Claus laugh.

“Goin’ on about nine o’clock,” said Joel, “the girls come along—­Sister Elvira an’ Thankful, Prudence Tucker, Belle Yocum, Sophrone Holbrook, Sis Hubbard, an’ Marthy Sawyer.  Marthy’s brother Increase wanted her to ride on his sled, but Marthy allowed that a red sled was her choice every time.  ‘I don’t see how I’m goin’ to hold on,’ said Marthy.  ‘Seems as if I would hev my hands full keepin’ my things from blowin’ away.’  ‘Don’t worry about yourself, Marthy,’ sez I, ‘for if you’ll look after your things, I kind o’ calc’late I’ll manage not to lose you on the way.’  Dear Marthy—­seems as if I could see you now, with your tangled hair a-blowin’ in the wind,