The Christmas Angel | Page 4

legs would
allow, and inspected him critically. He certainly was a forlorn specimen.
One of the black beads which had served him for eyes was gone. His
ears, which had originally stood up saucily on his head, now drooped in
limp dejection. One of them was a mere shapeless rag hanging by a
thread. He was dirty and discolored, and his tail was gone. But still he
smiled with his red-thread mouth and seemed trying to make the best of
things.
"What a nightmare!" said Miss Terry contemptuously. "I know there
isn't a child in the city who wants such a looking thing. Why, even the
Animal Rescue folks would give the boys a 'free shot' at that. This isn't
going to bring out any Christmas spirit," she sneered. "I will try it and
see."
Once more she lifted the window and tossed the dog to the sidewalk.
He rolled upon his back and lay pathetically with crooked legs yearning
upward, still smiling. Hardly had Miss Terry time to conceal herself
behind the curtain when she saw a figure approaching, airily waving a
stick.
"No ragamuffin this time," she said. "Hello! It is that good-for-nothing
young Cooper fellow from the next block. They say he is a millionaire.
Well, he isn't even going to see the Flanton Dog."
The young man came swinging along, debonairly; he was whistling
under his breath. He was a dapper figure in a long coat and a silk hat,
under which the candles lighted a rather silly face. When he reached the
spot in the sidewalk where the Flanton Dog lay, he paused a moment
looking down. Then he poked the object with his stick. On the other
side of the street a mother and her little boy were passing at the time.
The child's eyes caught sight of the dog on the sidewalk, and he hung

back, watching to see what the young man would do to it. But his
mother drew him after her. Just then an automobile came panting
through the snow. With a quick movement Cooper picked up the dog
on the end of his stick and tossed it into the street, under the wheels of
the machine. The baby across the street uttered a howl of anguish at the
sight. Miss Terry herself was surprised to feel a pang shoot through her
as the car passed over the queer old toy. She retreated from the window
quickly.
"Well, that's the end of Flanton," she said with half a sigh. "I knew that
fellow was a brute. I might have expected something like that. But it
looked so--so--" She hesitated for a word, and did not finish her
sentence, but bit her lip and sniffed cynically.
CHAPTER IV
THE NOAH'S ARK
"Now, what comes next?" Miss Terry rummaged in the box until her
fingers met something odd-shaped, long, and smooth-sided. With some
difficulty she drew out the object, for it was of good size.
"H'm! The old Noah's ark," she said. "I wonder if all the animals are in
there."
She lifted the cover, and turned out into her lap the long-imprisoned
animals and their round-bodied chief. Mrs. Noah and her sons had long
since disappeared. But the ark-builder, hatless and one-armed, still
presided over a menagerie of sorry beasts. Scarcely one could boast of
being a quadruped. To few of them the years had spared a tail. From
their close resemblance in their misery, it was not hard to believe in the
kinship of all animal life. She took them up and examined them
curiously one by one. Finally she selected a shapeless slate-colored
block from the mass. "This was the elephant," she mused. "I remember
when Tom stepped on him and smashed his trunk. 'I guess I'm going to
be an expressman when I grow up,' he said, looking sorry. Tom was
always full of his jokes. Now I'll try this and see what happens to the
ark on its last voyage."

Just then there was a noise outside. An automobile honked past, and
Miss Terry shuddered, recalling the pathetic end of the Flanton Dog,
which had given her quite a turn.
"I hate those horrid machines!" she exclaimed. "They seem like
Juggernaut. I'd like to forbid their going through this street."
She crowded the elephant with Noah and the rest of his charge back
into the ark and closed the lid. "I can't throw this out of the window,"
she reflected. "They would spill. I must take it out on the sidewalk.
Land! The fire's going out! That girl doesn't know how to build fires so
they will keep."
She laid the Noah's ark on the table, and going to the closet tugged out
several big logs, which she arranged geometrically. About laying fires,
as about most other things, Miss