and he said he calculated Santa Claus had skipped him this year 'cause
his father had broke his leg haulin' logs from the Pelham woods and had
been kep' indoors six weeks. But Martin had his ol' sled, and he
didn't hev to ask any odds of any of us, neither."

"I brought Martin a sled the _next_ Christmas," said Santa Claus.

"Like as not--but did you ever slide down hill, 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, just as if it was a boy, too, an' wanted to play with us. An
ol' crow came flappin' over us from the corn field 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 would n'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 was n'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 had n't been afraid of the constable that
lived next door. But the as