d the name.

"Look for Mary Donovan," said No. 4.

"Who are you?" asked the clerk.

"I am Sarah's husband," was the answer.

Clerk Betts smiled, and told the man the story of the other three.

"Well, I am blamed," he said.

MERRY CHRISTMAS IN THE TENEMENTS

It was just a sprig of holly, with scarlet berries showing against the
green, stuck in, by one of the office boys probably, behind the sign
that pointed the way up to the editorial rooms. There was no reason
why it should have made me start when I came suddenly upon it at the
turn of the stairs; but it did. Perhaps it was because that dingy
hall, given over to dust and draughts all the days of the year, was
the last place in which I expected to meet with any sign of Christmas;
perhaps it was because I myself had nearly forgotten the holiday.
Whatever the cause, it gave me quite a turn.

I stood, and stared at it. It looked dry, almost withered. Probably it
had come a long way. Not much holly grows about Printing-House Square,
except in the colored supplements, and that is scarcely of a kind to
stir tender memories. Withered and dry, this did. I thought, with a
twinge of conscience, of secret little conclaves of my children, of
private views of things hidden from mamma at the bottom of drawers,
of wild flights when papa appeared unbidden in the door, which I had
allowed for once to pass unheeded. Absorbed in the business of the
office, I had hardly thought of Christmas coming on, until now it was
here. And this sprig of holly on the wall that had come to remind
me,--come nobody knew how far,--did it grow yet in the beech-wood
clearings, as it did when I gathered it as a boy, tracking through the
snow? "Christ-thorn" we called it in our Danish tongue. The red
berries, to our simple faith, were the drops of blood that fell from
the Saviour's brow as it drooped under its cruel crown upon the cross.

Back to the long ago wandered my thoughts: to the moss-grown beech in
which I cut my name and that of a little girl with yellow curls, of
blessed memory, with the first jack-knife I ever owned; to the
story-book with the little fir tree that pined because it was small,
and because the hare jumped over it, and would not be content though
the wind and the sun kissed it, and the dews wept over it and told it
to rejoice in its young life; and that was so proud when, in the
second year, the hare had to go round it, because then it knew it was
getting big,--Hans