truck was a Christmas poem, a sentimental
Christmas poem, full of allusions to the family circle, and the old
homestead, and the stockings hanging by the fireplace, and all that sort
of thing.

That was enough. I put on my hat and overcoat and went down into the
street. The snow was coming down in long, slanting lines and the
sidewalks were all white, and where the lamplight shone on them they
looked like the frosting on birthday cakes. People laden with bundles
were diving in and out of all the shops. Every other shop window had a
holly wreath hung in it, and when the doors were opened those spicy
Christmassy smells of green hemlock and pine came gushing out in my
face.

So far as I could tell, everybody in New York--except me--was buying
something for his or her or some other body's Christmas. It was a
tolerably lonesome sensation. I walked two blocks, loitering sometimes
in front of a store. Nobody spoke to me except a policeman. He told me
to keep moving. Finally I went into a little family liquor store.
Strangely enough, considering the season, there was nobody there except
the proprietor. He was reading a German newspaper behind the bar. I
conferred with him concerning the advisability of an egg-nog. He had
never heard of such a thing as an egg-nog. I mentioned two old friends
of mine, named Tom and Jerry, respectively, and he didn't know them
either. So I compromised on a hot lemon toddy. The lemon was one that
had grown up with him in the liquor business, I think, and it wasn't
what you would call a spectacular success as a hot toddy; but it was
warming, anyhow, and that helped. I expanded a trifle. I asked him
whether he wouldn't take something on me.

He took a small glass of beer! He was a foreigner and he probably knew
no better, so I suppose I shouldn't have judged him too harshly. But it
was Christmas Eve and snowing outside--and he took a small beer!

I paid him and came away. I went back to my hall bedroom up on the top
floor and sat down at the window with my face against the pane, like
Little Maggie in the poem.

By now the pavements were two inches deep in whiteness and in the circle
of light around an electric lamp up at the corner of Ninth Avenue I
could see, dimly, the thick, whirling white flakes chasing one another
about madly, playing a Christmas game of their own. Across the way
foot-passengers were still passing in a straggly stream. I heard the
flat clatter of feet upon the stairs outsi