"Sure," said Ebenezer Rule, "tell 'em. And you might point out to 'em," he added, with his spasm of gutturals, "that failures is often salutary measures. Public benefactions. Fixes folks so's they can't spend their money fool." He walked with them across the lawn, going between them and guiding them among the empty aster beds. "They think I et up their savings in the failure," he went on, "when all I done is to bring 'em face to face with the fact that for years they've been overspending themselves. It takes Christmas to show that up. This whole Christmas business is about wore out, anyhow. Ain't it?" "That's what," Simeon said, "it's a spendin' sham, from edge to edge." Abel Ames was silent. The three skirted the flower beds and came out on the level sweep of turf before the house that was no house in the darkness, save that they remembered how it looked: a square, smoked thing, with a beard of dead creepers and white shades lidded over its never-lighted windows--a fit home for this man least-liked of the three hundred neighbours who made Old Trail Town. He touched the elbows of the other two men as they walked in the dark, but he rarely touched any human being. And now Abel Ames suddenly put his hand down on that of Ebenezer, where it lay in the crook of Abel's elbow. "What you got there?" he asked. "Nothing much," Ebenezer answered, irritably again. "It's an old glass. I was looking over some rubbish, and I found it--over back. It's a field glass." "What you got a field glass out in the dark for?" Abel demanded. "I used to fool with it some when I was a little shaver," Ebenezer said. He put the glass in Abel's hand. "On the sky," he added. Abel lifted the glass and turned it on the heavens. There, above the little side lawn, the firmament had unclothed itself of branches and lay in a glorious nakedness to three horizons. "Thunder," Abel said, "look at 'em look." Sweeping the field with the lens, Abel spoke meanwhile. "Seems as if I'd kind of miss all the fuss in the store around Christmas," he said,--"the extra rush and the trimming up and all." "Abel'll miss lavishin' his store with cut paper, I guess," said Simeon; "he dotes on tassels." "Last year," Abel went on, not lowering the glass, "I had a little kid come in the store Christmas Eve, that I'd never see before. He ask' me if he could get warm--and he set down on the edge of a chair by the stove, and he took in everything in the place. I ask' him his name, and he just smiled. I ask' him if he was glad it was Christmas, and he says, Was I. I was goin' to give him some cough drops, but when I come back from waiting on somebody he was gone. I never could find out who he was, nor see anybody that saw him. I thought mebbe this Christmas he'd come back. Lord, don't it look like a pasture of buttercups up there? Here, Simeon." Simeon, talking, took the glass and lifted it to the stars.