Ho! Ho! Ho! Santa Claus' Reading List

by A. A. Milne

  “You and Walter Mason are just as thick as leaves on a mulberry tree, Nan Sherwood! I saw you whispering together the other day when Walter came with his cutter to take Grace for a ride. Is he going to take you for a spin behind that jolly black horse of his?”

  “No, honey,” replied Nan, placidly. “And I wouldn’t go without you, you know very well.”

  “Oh! wouldn’t you, Nan? Not even with Walter?”

  “Certainly not!” cried Nan Sherwood, big-eyed at the suggestion.

  “Only because Dr. Beulah wouldn’t hear of such an escapade, I guess,” said the wicked Bess, laughing.

  “Now! just for that,” Nan declared, pretending to be angry, “I won’t tell you— yet— what we were talking about.”

  “You and Walter?”

  “Walter and I— yes.”

  “Secrets from your chum, Nan! You’re always having something on the side that you don’t tell me,” pouted Bess.

  “Nonsense! Don’t you know Christmas is coming and everybody has secrets this time of year?”

  “Hurry up, girls!” commanded the red-haired girl who was helping pull on the rope directly behind the chums. “I’m walking on your heels. It will be night before we get on the slide.”

  “We’re in the lead,” Bess flared back. “Don’t be afraid, Laura.”

  “That may be,” said Laura Polk, “but I don’t want Linda Riggs and her crowd right on top of us. They’re so mean. They came near running into us the other day.”

  “But the professor called ’em down for it,” said the fourth girl dragging the bobsled, who was a big, good-natured looking girl with a mouthful of big white teeth and a rather vacuous expression of countenance when she was not speaking.

  “He ought to send Linda Riggs and her friends down first,” Nan Sherwood suggested.

  “No, ma’am!” said Bess Harley, shrilly.

  “We’re here ahead of ’em all. We can go first, can’t we, Professor Krenner?”

  “Certainly, my dear,” responded the professor. “Look over the sled, Walter, and see that it is all right.”

  The handsome sled was almost new and there could be nothing the matter with it, Walter was sure. Other parties of girls from the Hall, dragging bobsleds, were appearing now. They were all the bigger girls of the school, for the younger ones, or “primes,” as they were designated, had their own particular hill to slide on, nearer the Hall.

  Dr. Beulah Prescott, principal of Lakeview Hall, believed in out-of-door sports for her girls; but they were not allowed to indulge in coasting or sleighing or skating or any other sport, unattended. Professor Krenner had general oversight of the coasting on Pendragon Hill, because he lived in a queerly furnished cabin at the foot of it and on the shore of the lake.

  He marshalled the sleds in line now and took out his watch. “Three minutes apart remember, young ladies,” he said. “Are you going with your sister’s sled, Walter?”

  “This first time,” said the boy, laughing. “Grace won’t slide if I don’t, although Nan knows how to steer just as well as I do.”

  “Of course she does,” said Bess, with assurance. “We don’t need a boy around,” she added saucily.

  “They’re very handy animals to have at times,” said the professor, drily. “Wait a bit, Miss Riggs!” he added sharply. “First come, first served, if you please. You are number three. Wait your turn.”

  “Well, aren’t those girls ever going to start?” snapped the tall girl, richly dressed in furs, who had come up with a party of chums and a very handsome “bob.”

  Professor Krenner was quite used to Linda’s over-bearing ways, and so were her fellow-pupils. They made the rich and purse-proud girl no more beloved by her mates. But she could always gather about her a few satellites— girls who felt proud to be counted the intimates of the daughter of a railroad president, and who enjoyed Linda Riggs’ bounty.

  Not that there were many girls at Lakeview Hall whose parents and guardians were not well off. The school was a very exclusive school. Its course of instruction prepared the girls for college, or gave them a “finish” for entrance upon their social duties, if they did not elect to attend a higher institution of learning.

  On this occasion Professor Krenner paid no further attention to Linda Riggs. Walter Mason had already taken his place on his sister’s sled at the steering wheel in front, with his boots on the footrests. His sister got on directly behind him and took hold of his belt. Behind her Nan, Bess, little, fair-haired Lillie Nevins, who was Grace’s particular chum, and who had ridden over on the sled from the Hall, Amelia Boggs, the homely girl, and Laura Polk, the red-haired, sat in the order named. There were rope “hand-holds” for all; but Grace preferred to cling to her brother. The first trip down the hill was always a trial to timid Grace Mason.

  “All ready?” queried Walter, firmly gripping the wheel.

  “Let her go!” cried Laura, hilariously.

  “And do give somebody else a chance!” exclaimed Linda.

  Professor Krenner’s watch was in his hand. “Go!” he shouted, and as the red-haired girl’s heels struck into the hard snow to start the creaking runners, the old gentleman put the bugle to his lips again and blew another fanfare.

  “We’re off!” squealed Bess, as the bobsled slipped over the brow of the descent and started down the slippery slide with a rush.

  Fifty feet below the brink of the hill a slight curve in the slide around a thick clump of evergreens hid the sled from the group at the top. They could hear only the delighted screams of the girls until, with a loud ring of metal on crystal, the runners clashed upon the ice and the bobsled darted into view again upon the frozen strait.

  The first bobsled ran almost to the Isle of Hope before it stopped. By that time Professor Krenner had started the second one, and the impatient Linda was clamoring for what she called her “rights.”

  “We’ll show ’em how to speed a bobsled, if you’ll give us a chance,” she complained. “That thing of the Mason’s didn’t get to the island. We’ll show ’em!”

  Nan Sherwood and her friends piled off the first sled upon the ice with great delight and much hilarity.

  “I declare!” gasped Laura. “I left my breath at the top of the hill. O-o-o! What a ride!”

  “It’s ju-just like swinging too high!” burst out flaxen-haired Lillie.

  Nan and Bess had brought their skates slung over their shoulders by the straps. Before getting up off the sled the chums put these on and then were ready to draw the heavy sled back across the ice to the shore.

  “Get aboard— all of you!” Bess cried. “All you lazy folks can have a ride!”

  “And do hurry!” added Nan. “Here come some more bobs.”

  The second sled did not gain momentum enough to slide half-way across the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Hope. But now appeared the “Linda Riggs’ crew,” as Laura called them, and their shiny, new sled. Out of the enveloping grove which masked the side of Pendragon Hill it came, shooting over the last “thank-you-ma’am” and taking the ice with a ringing crash of steel on crystal.

  “Got to hand it to ’em!” exclaimed Walter, with admiration. “That’s some sled Linda’s got.”

  “So’s ours,” Bess said stoutly. “See, they’re not going to run farther than we did.”

  “I don’t know about that,” murmured Nan, honestly.

  “Come on!” Bess cried. “Let’s get back and try it again. I know those horrid things can’t beat the Sky-rocket.”

  The other girls had already piled upon the bobsled. Walter started them with a push and called a “good-bye” after them. He was going to put on his own skates and skate up the strait to the Mason house. The family was staying here on the shores of Lake Huron much later than usual this year.

  Nan Sherwood and Bess Harley had no trouble at all in dragging their mates across the ice upon the Sky-rocket. Linda’s sled, the Gay Girl, did go farther than the first-named sled, and Bess was anxious to get to the top of t
he hill to try it over again.

  “It will never do in this world to let them crow over us,” Bess declared.

  She and Nan slipped off their skates at the edge of the ice and all six laid hold of the long rope to pull the Sky-rocket up the hill.

  A fourth bobsled rushed past them, the girls screaming and laughing; and then a fifth flew by.

  “Mrs. Gleason said she would come over before supper time,” Laura Polk said. Mrs. Gleason was the physical instructor at the Hall.

  “Let’s get her on our sled!” cried Bess.

  “Let’s!” chorused the others.

  But no teacher save Professor Krenner was on the brow of the hill when the Sky-rocket was hauled into position again. This time Nan steered, with firmly braced feet, her mittened hands on the wheel-rim, and her bright eyes staring straight down the course.

  “Are you ready?” cried the professor, almost as eager as the girls themselves. Then he blew the warning blast to tell all below on the hillside that the Sky-rocket was coming.

  Ta-ra! ta-ra! ta-ra-ra-ra! Ta-rat!

  With a rush the sled was off. It disappeared around the evergreen clump. The hum of its runners was dying away when suddenly there sounded a chorus of screams, evidently from the Sky-rocket crew. Following this, a crash and a turmoil of cries, expressing both anger and fright, rang out upon the lower hillside.

  The Fat Man With His Grouch

  Nan Sherwood had steered this big bobsled down Pendragon Hill many times. She had no fear of an accident when they started, although the rush of wind past them seemed to stop her breath and made her eyes water.

  There really was not a dangerous spot on the whole slide. It crossed but one road and that the path leading down to Professor Krenner’s cabin. At this intersection of the slide and the driveway, Walter Mason had erected a sign-board on which had been rudely printed:

  Stop! Look! Listen!

  Few people traversed this way in any case; and it did seem as though those who did would obey the injunction of the sign. Not so a heavy-set, burly looking man who was tramping along the half-beaten path just as Nan and her chums dashed down the hill on the bobsled. This big man, whose broad face showed no sign of cheerfulness, but exactly the opposite, tramped on without a glance at the sign-board. He started across the slide as the prow of the Sky-rocket, with Nan clinging to the wheel, shot into view.

  The girls shrieked in chorus— all but Nan herself. The stubborn, fat man, at last awakened to his danger, plunged ahead. There was a mighty collision!

  The fat man dived head-first into a soft snow bank on one side of the slide; the bobsled plunged into another soft bank on the other side, and all the girls were buried, some of them over their heads, in the snow.

  They were not hurt—

  “Save in our dignity and our pompadours!” cried Laura Polk, the red-haired girl, coming to the surface like a whale, “to blow.”

  “Goodness— gracious— Agnes!” ejaculated the big girl, who was known as “Procrastination” Boggs. “What ever became of that man who got in our way?”

  Nan Sherwood had already gotten out of the drift and had hauled her particular chum, Bess Harley, with her to the surface. Grace Mason and Lillie Nevins were crying a little; but Nan had assured herself at a glance that neither of the timid ones was hurt.

  She now looked around, rather wildly, at Amelia Boggs’ question. The fat man had utterly disappeared. Surely the bobsled, having struck him only a glancing blow, had not throw him completely off the earth!

  Bess was looking up into the snowy tree-tops, and Laura Polk suggested that maybe the fat man had been only an hallucination.

  “Hallucination! Your grandmother’s hat!” exclaimed Amelia Boggs. “If his wasn’t a solid body, there never was one!”

  “What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?” murmured Laura.

  “Both must be destroyed,” finished Bess. “But I see the tail of our bob, all right.”

  Just then Nan ran across the track. At the same moment a floundering figure, like a great polar bear in his winter coat, emerged from the opposite drift. The fat man, without his hat and with his face very red and wet, loomed up gigantically in the snow-pile.

  “Oh! Nan Sherwood!” cried Laura. “Have you found him?”

  The fat man glared at Nan malevolently. “So your name is Sherwood, it is?” he snarled. “You’re the girl that was steering that abominable sled— and you steered it right into me.”

  “Oh, no, sir! Not intentionally!” cried the worried Nan.

  “Yes, you did!” flatly contradicted the choleric fat man. “I saw you.”

  “Oh, Nan Sherwood!” gasped Amelia, “isn’t he mean to say that?”

  “Your name’s Sherwood, is it?” growled the man. “I should think I’d had trouble enough with people of that name. Is your father Robert Sherwood, of Tillbury, Illinois?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the wondering Nan.

  “Ha! I might have known it,” snarled the man, trying to beat the snow from his clothes. “I heard he had a girl up here at this school. The rascal!”

  Professor Krenner had just reached the spot from the top of the hill. From below had hurried the crews of bobsleds number two and three. Linda Riggs, who led one of the crews, heard the angry fat man speaking so unfavorably of Nan Sherwood’s father. She sidled over to his side of the track to catch all that he said.

  Nan, amazed and hurt by the fat man’s words and manner, would have withdrawn silently, had it not been for the last phrase the man used in reference to her father. Nan was very loyal, and to hear him called “rascal” was more than she could tamely hear.

  “I do not know what you mean, sir,” she said earnestly. “But if you really know my father, you know that what you say of him is wrong. He is not a rascal.”

  “I say he is!” ejaculated the man with the grouch.

  Here Professor Krenner interfered, and he spoke quite sharply.

  “You’ve said enough, Bulson. Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t know,” grumbled the fat man.

  “He can’t tell till he’s seen his lawyer,” whispered Laura Polk, beginning to giggle.

  “Are any of you girls hurt?” queried the professor, his red and white cap awry.

  “I don’t think so, Professor,” Bess replied. “Only Nan’s feelings. That man ought to be ashamed of himself for speaking so of Mr. Sherwood.”

  “Oh, I know what I’m talking about!” cried the fat man, blusteringly.

  “Then you can tell it all to me, Ravell Bulson,” bruskly interposed the professor again. “Come along to my cabin and I’ll fix you up. Mrs. Gleason has arrived at the top of the hill and she will take charge of you young ladies. I am glad none of you is hurt.”

  The overturned crew hauled their bobsled out of the drift. Linda Riggs went on with her friends, dragging the Gay Girl.

  “I’d like to hear what that fat man has to say about Sherwood’s father,” the ill-natured girl murmured to Cora Courtney, her room-mate. “I wager he isn’t any better than he ought to be.”

  “You don’t know,” said Cora.

  “I’d like to find out. You know, I never have liked that Nan Sherwood. She is a common little thing. And I don’t believe they came honestly by that money they brought from Scotland.”

  “Oh, Linda!” gasped Cora.

  “Well, I don’t!” declared the stubborn girl. “There is a mystery about the Sherwoods being rich, at all. I know they were as poor as church mice in Tillbury until Nan came here to school. I found that out from a girl who used to live there.”

  “Not Bess Harley?”

  “No, indeed! Bess wouldn’t tell anything bad about Nan. I believe she is afraid of Nan. But this girl I mean wrote me all about the Sherwoods.”

  “Nan is dreadfully close-mouthed,” agreed Cora, who was a weak girl and quite under Linda’s influence.

  “Well! Those Sherwoods were never anything in Tillbury. How Bess Harley came to take up with Nan,
the goodness only knows. Her father worked in one of the mills that shut down last New Year. He was out of work a long time and then came this fortune in Scotland they claim was left Mrs. Sherwood by an old uncle, or great uncle. I guess it’s nothing much to brag about.”

  “Bess said once it might be fifty thousand dollars,” said Cora, speaking the sum unctuously. Cora was poor herself and she loved money.

  “Oh, maybe!” exclaimed Linda Riggs, tossing her head. “But I guess nobody knows the rights of it. Maybe it isn’t so much. You know that there were other heirs who turned up when Nan’s father and mother got over to Scotland, and one while Nan thought she would have to leave school because there wasn’t money enough to pay her tuition fees.”

  “Yes, I know all about that,” admitted Cora, hurriedly. She had a vivid remembrance of the unfinished letter from Nan to her mother, which she had found and shown to Linda. Cora was not proud of that act. Nan had never been anything but kind to her and secretly Cora did not believe this ill-natured history of Nan Sherwood that Linda repeated.

  Those of my readers who have read the first volume of this series, entitled “Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp, Or, The Old Lumberman’s Secret,” will realize just how much truth and how much fiction entered into the story of Nan’s affairs related by the ill-natured Linda Riggs.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood started for Scotland to make sure of the wonderful legacy willed to Nan’s mother by the Laird of Emberon’s steward, Nan was sent up into the Peninsula of Michigan to stay with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Kate Sherwood at a lumber camp. Her adventures there during the spring and summer were quite exciting. But the most exciting thing that had happened to Nan Sherwood was the decision on her parents’ part that she should go with her chum, Bess Harley, to Lakeview Hall, a beautifully situated and popular school for girls on the shore of Lake Huron.

  In “Nan Sherwood at Lakeview Hall, Or, The Mystery of the Haunted Boathouse,” the second volume of the series, were narrated the incidents of Nan’s first term at boarding school. She and Bess made many friends and had some rivals, as was natural, for they were very human girls, in whom no angelic quality was over-developed.