ome quickly.

Very gently they lifted poor little Nibsy--for it was he, caught in his
berth by a worse enemy than the "cop" or the watchman of the
hay-barge--into the ambulance that bore him off to the hospital cot, too
late.

Conscious only of a vague discomfort that had succeeded terror and pain,
Nibsy wondered uneasily why they were all so kind. Nobody had taken the
trouble to as much as notice him before. When he had thrust his papers
into their very faces they had pushed him roughly aside. Nibsy, unhurt
and able to fight his way, never had a show. Sick and maimed and sore,
he was being made much of, though he had been caught where the boys were
forbidden to go. Things were queer, anyhow, and----

The room was getting so dark that he could hardly see the doctor's
kindly face, and had to grip his hand tightly to make sure that he was
there; almost as dark as the stairs in the alley he had come down in
such a hurry.

There was the baby now--poor baby--and mother--and then a great blank,
and it was all a mystery to poor Nibsy no longer. For, just as a
wild-eyed woman pushed her way through the crowd of nurses and doctors
to his bedside, crying for her boy, Nibsy gave up his soul to God.

* * * * *

It was very quiet in the alley. Christmas had come and gone. Upon the
last door a bow of soiled crape was nailed up with two tacks. It had
done duty there a dozen times before, that year.

Upstairs, Nibsy was at home, and for once the neighbors, one and all,
old and young, came to see him.

Even the father, ruffian that he was, offered no objection. Cowed and
silent, he sat in the corner by the window farthest from where the plain
little coffin stood, with the lid closed down.

A couple of the neighbor-women were talking in low tones by the stove,
when there came a timid knock at the door. Nobody answering, it was
pushed open, first a little, then far enough to admit the shrinking form
of a little ragamuffin, the smaller of the two who had stood breathing
peep-holes on the window-pane of the delicatessen store the night before
when Nibsy came along.

He dragged with him a hemlock branch, the leavings from some
Christmas-tree fitted into its block by the grocer for a customer.

"It's from Sante Claus," he said, laying it on the coffin. "Nibsy
knows." And he went out.

Santa Claus had come to Nibsy, after all, in his alley. And Nibsy knew.

[Illustration]

WHAT TH