OW 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.

The twenty-six children of the Santa Maria flats belonged to twenty
families. All of these twenty families were peculiar, as you might learn
any day by interviewing the families concerning one another. But they
bore with each other's peculiarities quite cheerfully and spoke in
the hall when they met. Sometimes this tolerance would even extend to
conversation about the janitor, a thin creature who did the work of five
men. The ladies complained that he never smiled.

"I wouldn't so much mind the hot water pipes leaking now and then," the
ladies would remark in the vestibule, rustling their skirts to show
that they wore silk petticoats, "if only the janitor would smile. But he
looks like a cemetery."

"I know it," would be the response. "I told Mr. Wilberforce last night
that if he would only get a cheerful janitor I wouldn't mind our having
rubber instead of Axminster on the stairs."

"You know we were promised Axminster when we moved in," would be the
plaintive response. The ladies