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After selecting a sled for Jamie, and directing that they should be sent at once, he could restrain his impatience no longer, and almost tore back to his station at the cottage window. His wife was placing the meagre little supper on the table, and how poor and scanty it was!

“Is that the best the dear soul can do on Christmas Eve?” he groaned. “Why, there’s scarcely enough for little Sue. Thank God, my darling, I will sit down with you to a rather different supper before long!”

He bowed his head reverently with his wife as she asked God’s blessing, and wondered at her faith. Then he looked and listened again with a heart-hunger which had been growing for months.

“Do you really think Santa Claus will fill our stockings to- night?” Sue asked.

“I think he’ll have something for you,” she replied. “There are so many poor little boys and girls in the city that he may not be able to bring very much to you.”

“Who is Santa Claus, anyway?” questioned Jamie.

Tears came into the wife’s eyes as she thought of the one who had always remembered them so kindly as far as his modest means permitted.

She hesitated in her reply; and before she could decide upon an answer there was a knock at the door. Jamie ran to open it, and started back as a man entered with cap, eyebrows, beard, and shaggy coat all white with the falling snow. He placed two great baskets of provisions on the floor, and said they were for Mrs. Anson Marlow.

“There is some mistake,” Mrs. Marlow began; but the children, after staring a moment, shouted, “Santa Claus! Santa Claus!”

The grocer’s man took the unexpected cue instantly, and said, “No mistake, ma’am. They are from Santa Claus;” and before another word could be spoken he was gone. The face of the grocer’s man was not very familiar to Mrs. Marlow, and the snow had disguised him completely. The children had no misgivings and pounced upon the baskets and with, exclamations of delight drew out such articles as they could lift.

“I can’t understand it,” said the mother, bewildered and almost frightened.

“Why, mamma, it’s as plain as day,” cried Jamie. “Didn’t he look just like the pictures of Santa Claus–white beard and white eyebrows? Oh, mamma, mamma, here is a great paper of red-cheeked apples!” and he and Susie tugged at it until they dragged it over the side of the basket, when the bottom of the bag came out, and the fruit flecked the floor with red and gold. Oh, the bliss of picking up those apples; of comparing one with another; of running to the mother and asking which was the biggest and which the reddest and most beautifully streaked!

“There must have been some mistake,” the poor woman kept murmuring as she examined the baskets and found how liberal and varied was the supply, “for who could or would have been so kind?”

“Why, mommie,” said little Sue, reproachfully, “Santa Claus brought ’em. Haven’t you always told us that Santa Claus liked to make us happy?”

The long-exiled father felt that he could restrain himself but a few moments longer, and he was glad to see that the rest of his purchases were at the door. With a look so intent, and yearning concentration of thought so intense that it was strange that they could not feel his presence, he bent his eyes once more upon a scene that would imprint itself upon his memory forever.

But while he stood there, another scene came before his mental vision. Oddly enough his thought went back to that far-off Southern brookside, where he had lain with his hands in the cool water. He leaned against the window-casing, with the Northern snow whirling about his head; but he breathed the balmy breath of a Southern forest, the wood-thrush sang in the trees overhead, and he could–so it seemed to him–actually feel the water-worn pebbles under his palms as he watched the life-blood ebbing from his side. Then there was a dim consciousness of rough but kindly arms bearing him through the underbrush, and more distinctly the memory of weary weeks of convalescence in a mountaineer’s cabin. All these scenes of peril, before he finally reached the Union lines, passed before him as he stood in a species of trance beside the window of his home.