[Jpos-devel] I'm running short of change. Bring it bac

[Zaitlin P. <lu...@ar...>]

They are little Bohemians; sometimes the children of refugee Jews; and
again, Italians, or the descendants of the Irish stock of Hell's Kitchen
and Poverty Row; always the poorest, the shabbiest, the hungriest--the
children Santa Claus loves best to find, if any one will show him the
way. Having so much on hand, he has no time, you see, to look them up
himself. That must be done for him; and it is done. To the teacher in
the Sullivan Street school came one little girl, this last Christmas,
with anxious inquiry if it was true that he came around with toys. "I
hanged my stocking last time," she said, "and he didn't come at all." In
the front house indeed, he left a drum and a doll, but no message from
him reached the rear house in the alley. "Maybe he couldn't find it,"
she said soberly. Did the teacher think he would come if she wrote to
him? She had learned to write. Together they composed a note to Santa
Claus, speaking for a doll and a bell--the bell to play "go to school"
with when she was kept home minding the baby. Lest he should by any
chance miss the alley in spite of directions, little Rosa was invited to
hang her stocking, and her sister's, with the janitor's children's in
the school. And lo! on Christmas morning there was a gorgeous doll, and
a bell that was a whole curriculum in itself, as good as a year's
schooling any day! Faith in Santa Claus is established in that Thompson
Street alley for this generation at least; and Santa Claus, got by hook
or by crook into an Eighth Ward alley, is as good as the whole Supreme
Court bench, with the Court of Appeals thrown in, for backing the Board
of Health against the slum. But the ice-cream! They eat it off the
seats, half of them kneeling or squatting on the floor; they blow on it,
and put it in their pockets to carry home to baby. Two little shavers
discovered to be feeding each other, each watching the smack develop on
the other's lips as the acme of his own bliss, are "cousins"; that is
why. Of cake there is a double supply. It is a dozen years since
"Fighting Mary," the wildest child in the Seventh Avenue school, taught
them a lesson there which they have never forgotten. She was perfectly
untamable, fighting everybody in school, the despair of her teacher,
till on Thanksgiving, reluctantly included in the general amnesty and
mince-pie, she was caught cramming the pie into her pocket, after eying