ta Claus! If you had asked that car full of people I would have
liked to hear the answers they would have given you. No Santa Claus!
Why, there was scarce a man in the lot who didn't carry a bundle that
looked as if it had just tumbled out of his sleigh. I felt of one slyly,
and it was a boy's sled--a "flexible flyer," I know, because he left
one at our house the Christmas before; and I distinctly heard the
rattling of a pair of skates in that box in the next seat. They were all
good-natured, every one, though the train was behind time--that is a
sure sign of Christmas. The brakeman wore a piece of mistletoe in his
cap and a broad grin on his face, and he said "Merry Christmas" in a way
to make a man feel good all the rest of the day. No Santa Claus, is
there? You just ask him!

And then the train rolled into the city under the big gray dome to which
George Washington gave his name, and by-and-by I went through a doorway
which all American boys would rather see than go to school a whole week,
though they love their teacher dearly. It is true that last winter my
own little lad told the kind man whose house it is that he would rather
ride up and down in the elevator at the hotel, but that was because he
was so very little at the time and didn't know things rightly, and,
besides, it was his first experience with an elevator.

As I was saying, I went through the door into a beautiful white hall
with lofty pillars, between which there were regular banks of holly with
the red berries shining through, just as if it were out in the woods!
And from behind one of them there came the merriest laugh you could
ever think of. Do you think, now, it was that letter in my pocket that
gave that guilty little throb against my heart when I heard it, or what
could it have been? I hadn't even time to ask myself the question, for
there stood my host all framed in holly, and with the heartiest
handclasp.

"Come in," he said, and drew me after. "The coffee is waiting." And he
beamed upon the table with the veriest Christmas face as he poured it
out himself, one cup for his dear wife and one for me. The children--ah!
you should have asked _them_ if there was a Santa Claus!

* * * * *

AND so we sat and talked, and I told my kind friends that my own dear
old mother, whom I have not seen for years, was very, very sick in
far-away Denmark and longing for her boy, and a mist came into my
hostess's gentle eyes and