Oh, a wonderful pudding!  Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage.  Mrs. Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour.  Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family.  It would have been, flat heresy to do so.  Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up.  The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire.  Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the family display of glasses.  Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily.  Then Bob proposed: 

“A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears.  God bless us!”

Which all the family re-echoed.

“God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

XXI.  HOW CHRISTMAS CAME TO THE SANTA MARIA FLATS*

* From “Ickery Ann and Other Girls and Boys,” by Elia W. Peattie.  Copyright, 1898, by Herbert S. Stone & Co., Duffield & Co., successors.

ELIA W. PEATTIE

There were twenty-six flat children, and none of them had ever been flat children until that year.  Previously they had all been home children. and as such had, of course, had beautiful Christmases, in which their relations with Santa Claus had been of the most intimate and personal nature.

Now, owing to their residence in the Santa Maria flats, and the Lease, all was changed.  The Lease was a strange forbiddance, a ukase issued by a tyrant, which took from children their natural liberties and rights.

Though, to be sure—­as every one of the flat children knew—­they were in the greatest kind of luck to be allowed to live at all, and especially were they fortunate past the lot of children to be permitted to live in a flat.  There were many flats in the great city, so polished and carved and burnished and be-lackeyed that children were not allowed to enter within the portals, save on visits of ceremony in charge of parents or governesses.  And in one flat, where Cecil de Koven le Baron was born—­just by accident and without intending any harm—­he was evicted, along with his parents, by the time he reached the age where he seemed likely to be graduated from the go-cart.  And yet that flat had not nearly so imposing a name as the Santa Maria.