It was not hard to get a doll the first year of the war, but before the second year was half over there was not one left in Middleburgh. The old doctor explained to Nancy Pansy that they had all gone away to the war. She did not quite understand what dollies had to do with fighting, but she knew that war made the dolls disappear. Still she kept on talking about the new doll she would get on her birthday at Christmas, and as the old doctor used to talk to her about it, and discuss the sort of hair it should have, and the kind of dress it should wear, she never doubted that she should get it in her stocking as usual on Christmas morning. II. The old doctor’s boots were very bad--those old boots which Middleburgh knew as well as they knew Nancy Pansy’s eyes or the church steeple. Mrs. Seddon had taken the trouble to scold him one day in the autumn when she heard him coughing, and she had sent him a small roll of money “on account,” she wrote him, “of a long bill,” to get a pair of new boots. The old doctor never sent in a bill; he would as soon have sent a small-pox patient into Nancy Pansy’s play-room. He calmly returned the money, saying he never transacted business with women who had husbands, and that he had always dressed to suit himself, at which Mrs. Seddon laughed; for, like the rest of Middleburgh, she knew that those old boots never stood back for any weather, however bad. She arranged, however, to have a little money sent to him through the post-office from another town without any name to the letter enclosing it. But the old boots were still worn, and Nancy Pansy, at her mother’s suggestion, learned to knit, that she might have a pair of yarn socks knit for the old doctor at Christmas. She intended to have kept this a secret, and she did keep it from every one but the doctor; she did not quite _tell_ even him, but she could not help making him “guess” about it. Christmas Eve she went over to the old doctor’s, and whilst she made him shut his eyes, hung up his stocking herself, into which she poked a new pair of very queer-shaped yarn socks, a little black in some places from her little hands, for they were just done, and there had not been time to wash them. She consulted the old doctor to know if he really--really, “now, really”--thought Santa Claus would bring her a doll “through the war;” but she could only get a “perhaps” out of him, for he said he had not heard from Harry.