Janet; or, The Christmas Stockings

IN the doorway of an old tenement-house, far down in the slums of New York, two women were standing, their heads close together as they gossiped about the passers-by.

A young girl—she might have been thirteen—tripped along the sidewalk, kicking her legs out in front of her as she went, so that she could see her stockings.

Her odd movements caught the women’s eyes, and they asked each other what could be the cause of them.

“I never see her act like that before. Puttin’ on such airs! Dear! dear! Saw ye ever the likes of it?”

“Oh, see her new stockings!” said the younger woman. “What mighty fine ones! Did you ever?”

“I doubt she came by them in no good way,” said the other. “Janet, young un! See here!”

The child stopped, holding up her tattered gown to show her pretty stockings. “Who give you them?” cried the woman who had called her.

The girl replied quietly, “’Twas the Bishop give me ’em.”

At this the women exclaimed in chorus, “The Bishop! That’s a fine tale! How’d you know it was the Bishop?”

Janet said Roy, the newsboy, told her; and the women asked her, “How is it your father hasn’t got hold of ’em? He’d sell ’em for drink inside of a minute.”

“Oh, I only wears ’em on the street,” said Janet, “and I takes ’em off an’ hides ’em before I go home.”

The women begged her to tell them all about it, and settled themselves comfortably to hear the story.

The girl’s tale ran thus: one day a lot of children were dancing on the sidewalk to the tune of an old organ-grinder, and she began dancing with them. Roy then came by with his newspapers, and, putting them down on a step, seized her round the waist and whirled her off among the little children. He stopped suddenly, for a gentleman who was passing wanted a paper. The girl was overheated with her dancing, and began to fan herself with one of Roy’s papers; Roy said afterwards her eyes were as bright as stars.

The gentleman asked her name, and where she lived; and when she told him, he said, “Janet, if you will come to yonder church,” pointing to the steeple, “at seven o’clock on Christmas night, I will give you something to take home with you.” Then he paid Roy for the paper, and gave the change to Janet, saying with a smile, “This will buy some refreshments for the ball.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “I am very hungry. I have had nothing to eat since yesterday noon.”

At this the gentleman didn’t smile any more, but looked sad. “Why did you dance, then?” he said.

Roy spoke before she had a chance to answer: “Sir, Janet was hungry and cold, and that was the best way to get warm.” The gentleman walked away, and she could see him rub the back of his hand across his eyes. She asked Roy what his name was, and he said he didn’t know, but it was the Bishop.

She bought something to eat with the money, and divided it with Roy, and he ran off to sell his papers. The organ-grinder went on his way, and the children stopped dancing.

So on Christmas night, Janet went early to the big church, as the Bishop had told her to do. When she got inside the door, she stood still with wonder, for there was a great tree, as big as an out-door tree, all lighted with little candles from the floor to the top, and all over it were hanging sparkling toys. And when she came near to it, she saw the Bishop standing by it.

She did not think he would know her again, but he smiled and said, “Janet, I was expecting you.” And then he took a stick with a hook on the end of it, and, reaching over the heads of some fine ladies who were arranging things at the foot of the tree, he took the stockings down and put them in her hands. Then he put his white hands on her head, and said, “God bless you, my child! Remember, keep yourself pure and clean to your life’s end.” Each stocking had a silver dollar in the toe, and was filled with candy, and tied around the top with a blue ribbon to keep the candy in.

“See!” said Janet, as she told the story, “I tie the ribbon on each leg to keep me from getting out.” She lifted the ragged gown to show the ribbon garters. She said she skipped out of the great big church, hugging the stockings close to her and covering them with a bit of her shawl to hide her treasure from the people she passed.

“Don’t you know such a fine bishop’s name?” asked one of the women.

“No,” said the child, “but Roy said he was the good Bishop who stays down here with us, and don’t go away frolicking. And now I must go to see Roy. There he is calling his extras at the corner.”

“Well, I never!” said one of the women, as the child skipped away. “She seems to make friends, don’t she? She and that boy are awful fond of each other; and now there ’s this Bishop!”

“Well,” said the other, “Janet is a pretty girl, with her dark eyes, and her hair always braided in one long plait down her back—and even if she is in rags, her hair is always tidy.”

“Her father sells everything that people give her—it ’s a wonder he don’t cut off her hair and sell that. Well, the girl has a white skin, and a pretty mouth, and a straight nose just like her mother’s. She don’t look and she don’t act like as if she was born and raised here among us poor folks.”

“That she don’t; and she ’s such a little mite for her age, with those little hands and feet. You wouldn’t take her to be fourteen, would you, now?”

While the women were talking her over, Janet went to find Roy, who stood at the corner shivering with the cold, with his papers under his arm.

“Hello, Roy!” said she, “see my beautiful stockings! That Bishop gave ’em to me off the tree, and they was full of candy and money!” Coming close to him, she said in a whisper, “Here ’s some for you!” and she took a little paper bag full of candy from under her ragged shawl where she had hidden it.

“Oh, Roy,” she said, “it was the finest tree you ever did see! And the Bishop gave me the stockings his own self, and when he gave them to me he put his hands on my head, and what do you think he said? He said, ‘God bless you, my child! Remember to keep yourself pure and clean to the end of your life.’ And when he was a-saying it, he looked up at a sugar boy with shiny wings that was hanging on the top of the tree.”

The boy and girl parted at the corner, he to sell his papers through the cold and the mire of the slums, and she to go to her poor, wretched home.

She mounted the rickety stairs of an old tenement-house, up to the top floor, where, in one small garret, the whole family lived. In one corner of the room was an old ragged straw mattress, on which the father, mother, and baby slept. The baby was asleep now, the father was drinking in a saloon near by. In another corner was a pile of straw where Janet and her sister Bessie slept; and in yet another, on a heap of rags and paper, lay two pretty little boys, sound asleep, unconscious of the fact that they were cold and hungry. One could see, in spite of rags and dirt, that they were like cherubs, with their sunny curls.

The poor mother sat by the feeble light of a candle, the wick burned nearly down to the bottle which served for a candlestick. She was sewing on a coarse garment that she wanted to finish, in order to buy bread for the children with the few pennies she would get for it.

All that any of them had eaten that day was some candy that Janet had slyly put in their mouths, not letting them know where she kept it. Janet went to her mother, the poor, tired, sick woman, and, bidding her open her mouth, she fed her with sweet chocolate and brought her a drink of water.

Then she sat down by the suffering woman, and hugged her poor cold feet to her heart, trying to warm them. In a low voice, so as not to waken the sleeping children, she gave her mother a description of the beautiful tree, and how the Bishop had given her the stockings himself.

“I take them off and hide them when I get home,” she said, “so father will not sell them; and the candy I hid last night under my pile of straw—that’s how I had these good chocolates for you now.”

And then she repeated again to her mother the words of the good Bishop, “Remember, keep yourself pure and clean to the end of your life.”

The mother swallowed hard, as though her throat hurt her, and she became deadly pale.

“Oh, mother!” said the child, “the Bishop has made me feel so happy—and even this old garret looks better than it did, because I am so happy.”

The mother said: “I feel peaceful and happy too while I listen to you. You make my thoughts go back to when I was a little girl. I remember a hymn I used to sing in Sunday-school.” And in a broken way, gasping for breath, she repeated the last two lines: