Tommy Trot's Visit to Santa Claus

As wide awake as a boy could be who had made up his mind to keep awake until midnight. Frontispiece Tommy had never before had any real coasting like this. 10 They flew on, over fields of white snow. 43 “Look, Look! The captain has lent that little boy his ‘Seven Leaguers.’” 54 What was their horror to find that they both had forgotten to load their guns. 84 Santa Claus said to him, “I want to put Johnny in bed without waking him up.” 93 TOMMY TROT’S VISIT TO SANTA CLAUS I The little boy whose story is told here lived in the beautiful country of “Once upon a Time.” His name, as I heard it, was Tommy Trot; but I think that, maybe, this was only a nick-name. When he was about your age, he had, on Christmas Eve, the wonderful adventure of seeing Santa Claus in his own country, where he lives and makes all the beautiful things that boys and girls get at Christmas. In fact, he not only went to see him in his own wonderful city away up toward the North Pole, where the snow never melts and the Aurora lightens up the sky; but he and his friend, Johnny Stout, went with dogs and guns to hunt the great polar bear whose skin afterwards always lay in front of the big library fireplace in Tommy’s home. This is the way it all happened. Tommy lived in a big house on top of quite a high hill, not far from a town which could be seen clearly from the front portico and windows. Around the house was a large lawn with trees and shrubbery in it, and at the back was a big lot, in one corner of which stood the stables and barns, while on the other side sloped down a long steep hill to a little stream bordered with willows and maples and with a tract of woodland beyond. This lot was known as the “cow-pasture,” and the woodland was known as the “wood-lot,” while yet beyond was a field which Peake, the farmer, always spoke of as the “big field.” On the other side of the cow-lot, where the stables stood, was a road which ran down the hill and across the stream and beyond the woods, and on the other side of this road near the bottom of the hill…