Read Ebook: Tommy Trot's Visit to Santa Claus by Page Thomas Nelson Anderson Victor C Illustrator

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Ebook has 300 lines and 17833 words, and 6 pages

"How do you help?" asked Tommy's father, as they started off.

"Oh, just little ways," said Johnny. "I get wood--and split it up--and go to Mr. Bucket's and get her things for her--draw water and feed the cow, when we had a cow--we ain't got a cow now since our cow died--and--oh--just a few little things like that."

Tommy's father made no reply, and Tommy, himself, was divided between wonder that Johnny could call all that work "just a few little things," and shame that he should say, "ain't got," which he, himself, had been told he must never say.

His father, however, presently asked, "Who is Mr. Bucket?"

"Don't you know Mr. Bucket?" said Johnny. "He keeps that grocery on Hill Street. He gave me the box I made this old thing out of."

"Oh," said Tommy's father, and turned and looked the sled over again.

"What was the matter with your cow?" asked Tommy.

"Broke her leg--right here," and Johnny pulled up his trousers and showed just where the leg was broken below the knee. "The doctor said she must be killed, and so she was; but Mr. Bucket said he could have saved her if the 'Siety would've let him. He'd 'a just swung her up until she got well."

"How?" asked Tommy, much interested.

"What Society?" asked his father.

Johnny answered the last question first. "'Pervention of Cruelty,'" he said, shortly.

"Oh," said Tommy's father.

"I know how she broke her leg," said Johnny.

"How did she break her leg?" inquired Tommy.

"A boy done it. I know him and I know he done it, and some day I'm going to catch him when he ain't looking for me."

"You have not had a cow since?" inquired Tommy's father. "Then you do not have to go and drive her up and milk her when the weather is cold?"

He did not say what there was since; he just stopped talking and presently Tommy's father said: "You do not have so much money since?"

"No, sir!" said Johnny, "and my mother has to work a heap harder, you see."

"And you work too?"

"Some," said Johnny. "I sell papers and clean off the sidewalk when there is snow to clean off, and run errands for Mr. Bucket and do a few things. Well, I've got to go along," he added, "I've got some things to do now. I was just trying this old sled over on the hill to see how she would go. I've got some work to do now"; and he trotted off, whistling and dragging his sled behind him.

As Tommy and his father turned into their grounds, his father asked, "Where did he say he lived?"

"Wait, I'll show you," said Tommy, proud of his knowledge. "Down there . See that little house down in the bottom, away over beyond the cow-pasture?"

"How do you know he lives there?"

"Because I've been there. He's got goats," said Tommy, "and he let me drive them. I wish I had some goats. I wish Santa Claus would bring me two goats like Johnny's."

"Which would you rather have? Goats or a cow?" asked his father.

"Goats," said Tommy, promptly.

"I wonder if Johnny would!" laughed his father.

"Father, where is Greenland?" said Tommy, presently.

"A country away up at the North--away up in that direction." His father pointed far across the cow-pasture, which lay shining in the evening light. "I must show it to you on the map."

"Is it very cold there?" asked Tommy.

"Very cold in winter."

"Colder than this?"

"Oh, yes, because it is so far north that the sun never gets up in winter to warm it, and away up there the winter is just one long night and the summer one long day."

"Why, that's where Santa Claus comes from," said Tommy. "Do people live up there?"

"People called Eskimos," said his father, "who live by fishing and hunting."

"Tell me about them," said Tommy. "What do they hunt?"

"Oh, tell me about them," said Tommy, eagerly.

So, as they walked along, his father told him of the strange little, flat-faced people, who live all winter in houses made of ice and snow and hunted on the ice-floes for polar bears and seals and walrus, and in the summer got in their little kiaks and paddled around, hunting for seals and walrus with their arrows and harpoons, on the "pans" or smooth ice, where every family of "harps" or seals have their own private door, gnawed down through the ice with their teeth.

"I wish I could go there," said Tommy, his eyes gazing across the long, white glistening fields with the dark border of the woodland beyond and the rich saffron of the winter sky above the tree-tops stretching across in a border below the steelly white of the upper heavens.

"What would you do?" asked his father.

"Hunt polar bears," said Tommy promptly. "I'd get one most as big as the library, so mother could give you the skin; because I heard her say she would like to have one in front of the library fire, and the only way she could get one would be to give it to you for Christmas."

His father laughed. "All right, get a big one."

"You will have to give me a gun. A real gun that will shoot. A big one--so big." Tommy measured with his arms out straight. "Bigger than that. And I tell you what I would do. I would get Johnny and we would hitch his goats to the sled and drive all the way up there and hunt polar bears, and I'd hunt for sealskins, too, so you could give mother a coat. I heard her say she wanted you to give her one. Wouldn't it be fine if I could get a great big bearskin and a sealskin, too! I wish I had Johnny's goats!"

"You must have dogs up there to draw your sled," said his father.

"All right! After I got there I would get Santa Claus to give me some," said Tommy. "But you give me the gun."

His father laughed again. "Well, maybe--some day," said he.

"'Some day' is too far away," said Tommy. "I want to go now."

"Not so far away when you are my age," said his father smiling. "Ah, there is where the North Star is," he said, pointing. "You cannot see it yet. I will show it to you later, so you can steer by it."

"That is the way Santa Claus comes," said Tommy, his eyes on the Northern sky. "I am going to wait for him tomorrow night."

"You know he does not bring things to boys who keep awake!"

"I know; but I won't let him see me."

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