the depot to meet him, and how people would have crowded around to shake hands with him, and what a fuss they would have made over him—as they did one winter when Alexis was here, you know, and you climbed up a lamp-post to get a glimpse of him. Wasn’t he splendid, though! How grand it must be to be the son of a Czar!” But during the Christmas holidays, now almost over, there has been no school, and Rudolph has had nothing to do but the marketing, and keeping the walk before the house clear of snow, and running here and there about the city on errands for his father—who never has any vacation, the year round. And all these days, oh, how that demon has tantalized him! It would lead him through the market to where lay great heaps of turkeys and geese and ducks, so plump and tempting, ready for the oven. “But _you_ can’t buy any, they cost too much!” It would draw him close up to the bakery windows. “Wouldn’t Karl like one of those delicious cakes, though! But you can’t buy it, it costs too much. Isn’t it too bad to have to count the pennies so?” All the way down the street, of pleasant afternoons, it would keep tormenting, pointing now at the richly-dressed ladies out shopping: “Pity your mother can’t have velvets, and feathers, and furs, like that, and be fashionable!” now exclaiming: “Look! there goes Jesse James. He’s taking his sister out for a sleigh-ride. Aren’t those horses just splendid! and that robe, look at it! it’s a real tiger’s skin! and the bells, oh, how they jingle! By the way, did you hear him telling one of the schoolboys, last week, about the Christmas present he was going to give his cousin Florence?—a set of diamonds! think of it! Here are some, right here in this shop-window. Look at them! see how they shine!... Pity _you_ can’t make somebody a Christmas present!—your cousin Mina, for instance. Pity _you_ can’t take somebody out sleigh-riding. Never had a sleigh-ride yourself, for that matter. Never had a ride any way, except in a street-car. Never had a single chance to drive a horse, even.... What’s the reason some can have everything they want, and others—oh! don’t it make you mad the way things go on in this world?” Yes, it does make him “mad.” He goes about glum and scowling. (He used to be pleasant enough.) The ripple of his laughter is no longer heard, and he frolics no more with little Karl, who hardly dares approach him, he is so cross. And thus it is that his mother is led to question if he is not well, and thus it is that his father comes to suspect what is the trouble, and to guess the name of the demon that has crept in to disturb their peaceful home, and to vex the bright, ambitious boy he is so proud of. The book he is reading has lost its interest, for hours he scarcely turns a page; and it is a great relief to lay it aside when the consoling little Karl, feeling that something is amiss, climbs sleepily into his arms and lays a velvety cheek against his own.