Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 35, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 December 1902 — WON HIS CHILDREN'S LOVE [ARTICLE]

WON HIS CHILDREN'S LOVE

BY THOMAS HALL.

WRINKLES of care furrowed the forehead of John Howard, wholesale leather merchant of New York, as he sat in the library of his home, and his hair was tossed into disorder by the combing of his nervous fingers. His dull eyes gazed into the red depths of a great fire, but read no crimson pictures there. This was the man the world had called “complacent John Howard.” Eight years before, when he married, people expected a change in his habits, but they disappointed. He had merely added another part to his machinery. He had carefully chosen the kind of woman who would helplessly become a part of a machine. When children came they, too, were compelled to become parts of the orderly, silent machine by John Howard. Meek little mites they were. No one suspected that they were children. There were three of them: Mary, a girl of seven; Anna, a girl of five, and John, a boy of four. By direction of John Howard, good, plain names were given to them, names that would wear. Meek Mrs. Howard would have chosen differently, but she was not consulted. When the children came, John Howard laid down the rules for their conduct and keeping; and never afterward bothered himself about them. If he saw them once a day it was accident. One of his rules, conditions, was that he was never to hear them, save when he wished. As a result John Howard was a father without children —and the children had a living father, but were fatherless. All this would have continued but. for one, inevitable little incident in life called “death” —for death, after all, is a part es life, and dying very often the main part of living. The entrance of Mrs. Howard into the life of her husband had made no perceptible change in it. Her death had thrown every part of it out of gear. There were three waifs in his noose who came at his bidding and looked at him in a frightened sort of way. “How was he to win the love of his children?” How John Howard longed to enter that play room! But he never dared. He was afraid his entrance would drive them forth, and he realised that this room was their own little world. Sometimes, in agony, he listened at the door, and learned how different they were from other children. Hew he longed for them to ask him for something! What joy he would take tn granting them any wish! But they had been brought up to ask for nothing, to expect nothing, save on one day in the year. That day was Christmas. On that day they could expect wonderful new presents, they knew, from a mysterious person called Santa Claus. The late Mrs. Howard had cultivated this one dear delusion in them, and so perfectly that they never dreamed that either she er their father had anything to do with the annual midnight visit of the good little fat man. Of him they talked months before he came and months after he left. And with the presents he left they played from one Christmas until the next, patiently waiting for the new ones and carefully guarding the old. Discouraged at his failure to win even the confidence of his children, John Howard hired that hopeless substitute for a mother, a nurse, to take care of them. With business acumen and lack of ordinary common sense he secured a grim New England school teacher for this delicate position; and in less than a week she succeeded, by perseverance and industry, in casting more of a shadow over the lives of the three waifs than ever John Howard had. But the waifs bad boea -taught not to complain, and John Howard know nothing about it. Ono lingering hope remained in his breast. Could he make the coming Christmas so happy Tor his children that be could win their love? Ho resolved that he would take charge of the holiday himself, and the preparations ho made for It were extravagant The presents purchased for all the priredklg ChristMs celebrations at Ml house were as nothing compared to the array that stood before him on the floor, on tables and on •hairs, this Christmas eve when he sat so broken in heart before his grata fire. Something had happened. A mistake had bsea made. The New England school

teacher, in the interests of white-winged truth, had told his children there was no Santa Claus. Thia he had learned while listening at the door of their playroom that afternoon. And he, who had so carefully rehearsed the part of Santa Claus for the performance that night, felt that it would be a hollow mockery, now that they knew, as we all do some day, too much. With a promptness and decision that had characterised him always in business, John Howard peremptorily dismissed the New England school teacher, giving her a month’s salary and no explanation for his strange conduct The children should have the hollow mockery of Christmas at any rate. But the essence of it was gone. He had heard his children declare, between sobs, that they would never hang up their stockings again, and after all It is the stocking and not the tree that is the essence of Christmas —and the mystery of mysteries thereof is the wonderful fact that Santa Claus can spend so much time and take so much pains in filling the stockings. But John Howard was human. He himself had looked forward to this Christmas with greater expectations than had any of his children. He rose from bed and put on his dressing gown and slippers. Then, with a little night lamp in his hand turned very low, he went stealthily into the bedroom where his children slept. Their clothes were laid neatly on three chairs, and from each chair he took a stocking and pinned it where the sleeping children had been accustomed to pin them in previous years. After this he made frequent trips to the library and brought up load after load of toys, candies and trinkets. And then he began to fill the stockings. It was alow work. He had seen his wife do it once. He had watched her then in a mechanical sort of way. It waa on the preceding Christmas eve. She was ill and nervous and afraid to go about the house alone. In a grumbling, protesting way he had accompanied her.

How glad he was now that he had! He dropped a moderately heavy object into the toe of each stocking to hold it down —then an orange to make it capacious. After thia he slipped in a present for the sake of a surprise, and on top of the present he put a layer of candy. He wondered that the “tick—tick —tick" of the candles as they dropped did not awaken the sleeping children. Ho was alow at the work. It was early down when he finished. He blew out the little night lamp and sank into a chair, burying his face in his hands, and his heart in memories. Suddenly he looked up and saw his three children standing about him in the arc of a circle. “It’s papa,” cried his eldest girl, rushing into hla arms. “Papa is Santa Claus. It is papa who haa been so good to us and we haven’t loved him.” “It’s papa,” echoed the younger daughter. “Papa—Santy Close," said the boy. And they, too, sidled up to him and clung to him, their little eyes beaming with love. And then John Howard knew that Lis stocking had been filled, also—with the love of his children.—Criterion.