Our neighbors could not always be doing such diplomatic acts, and after a while we had to go back to treacle and bread, hourly expecting word from America. We had faith that Uncle Stanwood would let us hear from him, though his long, disheartening silence worried us considerably. Aunt did not go to work, because she hoped at any day to hear the call, “Come to America.” Then in desperation Aunt had her name put on the pauper’s list for a shilling a week. I had to go to the parish house on Monday mornings, and stand in line with veteran paupers--“Barley-corn Jack,” the epileptic octogenarian, Widow Stanbridge, whose mother and grandparents before her had stood in this Monday line, Nat Harewell, the Crimean hero, who had a shot wound in his back, and many other minor characters who came for the shilling. The first Monday I stood in’t, I chanced to step in front of “Barley-corn” Jack, who, unknown to me at the time, was usually given the place of honor at the head of the line. He clutched me by the nape of the neck, whirled me around, lifted up my upper lip with a dirty finger, and grinned, “Got a row of ’em, likely ’nough! Screw th’ face, young un, screw it tight, wil’t?” I was so terror stricken, and tried to escape his clutch with such desperation, that Nat Harewell interjected, “Lend ’im hup, Jack, lend ’im hup, owld un!” and Jack did let me go with a whirl like a top until I was dazed. I fell in line near the Widow, who laughed at me, showing her black teeth; and then, while she twisted an edge of her highly flavored and discolored shawl, and chewed on it, she asked, “Was’t ale ur porter ’at browt thee wi’ uns, laddie?” I replied that I was Al Priddy and that _I_ was “respectable.” With that, the line began to move past the clerk’s window, and there was no more talking. In such circumstances we reached the Christmas season, and still we had no word from America. It was the night before Christmas, and a night before Christmas in an English town is astir with romance, joy, and poetic feeling. The linen draper had a white clay church in his window, with colored glass windows behind which burned a candle. The butcher had his pink pig in his window with a hat on its head, a Christmas grin on its face, and a fringe of pigs’ tails curled into spirals hanging in rows above him. There were tinsel laden trees with golden oranges peeping out from behind the candy stockings, wonderlands of toys, and The Home of Santy, where he was seen busy making toys for the world. I had gone down the row with my aunt, looking at all that, for aunt had said, “Al, there’s to be a sorry Christmas for you this time. You had better get all you can of it from the shop windows.” We were pushed this way and that by the crowds that went by doing their shopping. Once we had been with them in the Christmas spirit, now we dwelt apart because of our poverty.