The escape of Alice: A Christmas fantasy

								

in just to see how much she could get out of him. And then he hurried,
so that he could finish quickly with the others and get around to
Alice. It wasn’t very long until there she was――right up beside him,
with his dear old whiskers tickling her shell-like ears (one of them,
anyway), and his pen poised over a perfectly blank page, ready to write
down anything that Alice asked him to. And his voice, too, was very
pleasant.
“Now,” said this kindly old saint, adjusting his eyebrows with some
care, for they were slightly moth-eaten and appeared to be falling
off――and no wonder, either, for some hundreds of boys and girls had
been leaning against them all day――“Now,” said this nice old man, “what
do you wish me to bring you for Christmas, little Golden-hair?”
There was something charming about the way he emphasized the you that
put Alice at ease immediately. So she told him all about the lovely
doll, and the darling kitten, and the sweet bird she wanted, and had
been wanting for a long time, and all about the books she needed with
which to catch up on the world. For she had been locked away for so
long that she felt a bit out of date, and such phrases as “League of
Nations” and “Maple Nut Sundae” simply meant nothing to her, while they
were the common property of every other girl and boy in the land.
The good-natured old soul wrote them all down very carefully, and then
kissed Alice just as she had expected he would. He promised faithfully
to deliver every one of her orders, in person, and warned her about
seeing that the hearth fire was extinguished before midnight.
“Because promptly at midnight,” he said, “I shall come down the
chimley.”
Alice giggled at that.
“You mean the chimney, don’t you?” she asked.
“Chimney, indeed!” snorted Santa Claus. “After all these years, don’t
you think I know the difference between a chimney and a chimley? No,
sir! I come down a chimley, every time. I’ll leave it to everyone here.”
And turning to the crowd of boys and girls around him, he asked: “How
do I get into the house, children?”
“Down the chimley!” roared the chorus.
“You see?” said Santa Claus.
Alice did see, and felt very much ashamed of her display of ignorance.
“Never mind,” said Santa Claus, kindly. “But I think,” he added, “you
had better go with my assistant, and be quite sure we have all these
things in stock. He’ll be glad to show you around. It’s all free, you
know. Just look around as long as you like, and if you see anything
else you want, come right back and tell me about it.”
There was a little boy standing beside Santa Claus, with a metal tag
on his collar, and the generous old gentleman turned to him and told
him to go and fetch his――that is, Santa Claus’s――assistant. While Alice
was waiting, a lot of other children pushed forward, and Alice was