The Little City of Hope | Page 4

of nothing for
Newton, seeing that a thirteen-year-old boy wants everything under the
sun to cheer him up when he has no brothers and sisters, and school is
closed for the holidays, and his mother is away from home, and there is
nobody but a dear old tiresome father who has his nose over a lathe all
day long unless he is blinding himself with calculating quaternions for
some reason that no lad, and very few men, can possibly understand.
John Henry was obliged to confess that hope was not much of a
Christmas present for a boy in Newton's surroundings.
For the surroundings would be dismal in the extreme. A rickety cottage
on an abandoned Connecticut farm that is waiting for a Bohemian
emigrant to make it pay is not a gay place, especially when two-thirds
of the house has been turned into a workshop that smells everlastingly
of smith's coal, brass filings, and a nauseous chemical which seemed to
be necessary to the life of the Air-Motor, and when the rest of the house
is furnished in a style that would make a condemned cell look attractive
by contrast.
Besides, it would rain or snow, and it rarely snowed in a decent
Christian manner by Christmas. It snowed slush, as Newton expressed
it. A certain kind of snow-slush makes nice hard snowballs, it is true,
just like stones, but when there is no other boy to fight, it is no good.
Overholt had once offered to have a game of snow-balling with his son
on a Saturday afternoon in winter; and the invitation was accepted with
alacrity. But it was never extended again. The boy was a perfect terror
at that form of diversion. Yet so distressed was Overholt at the prospect
of a sad Christmas for his son that he even thought of voluntarily

giving up his thin body to the torment again on the 25th of December,
if that would amuse Newton and make it seem less dull for him.
Good-will towards men, and even towards children, could go no further
than that, even at Christmas time. At least Overholt could think of no
greater sacrifice that might serve.
For what are toys to a boy of thirteen? He wants a gun and something
to kill, or he wants a boat in which he can really sail, or a live pony
with a real head, a real tail, and four real legs, one at each corner. That
had been Newton's definition of the desired animal when he was six
years old, and some one had given him a wooden one on rockers with
the legs painted on each side. Girls of thirteen can still play with dolls,
and John Henry had read that, far away in ancient times, girls dedicated
their dolls, with all the dolls' clothes, to Artemis on the eve of their
wedding-day. But no self-respecting boy of thirteen cares a straw for
anything that is not real, except an imaginary pain that will keep him
away from school without cutting down his rations; and in the
invention and presentation of such fictitious suffering he beats all the
doll-makers in Germany and all the playwrights and actors in the world.
You must have noticed that the pain is always as far from the stomach
as is compatible with probability. Toothache is a grand thing, for
nobody can blame a healthy boy for eating then, if he can only bear the
pain. And he can, and does, bear it nobly, though with awful faces. The
little beast knows that all toothaches do not make your cheek swell.
Then there is earache; that is a splendid invention; it goes through your
head like a red-hot corkscrew with a powerful brakeman at the other
end, turning it steadily--between meals. Only certain kinds of things
really serve to make him stop. Ice-cream is one, and it takes a great
deal of it. It is well known that ice will cool a red-hot corkscrew.
But this is a digression, for no boy ever has any pain at Christmas; it is
only afterwards that it comes on; usually about ten days.
After an hour Overholt came to the conclusion that he had better take
Pandora's box out to the cottage and sit on it there, since nothing
suggested itself to him, in spite of his immense good-will to accept any
suggestion which the spirit of coming Christmas might be kind enough
to offer; and if he could do nothing else, he could at least work at his
machine, and try to devise some means of constructing the
tangent-balance, with the materials he had left, and perhaps, by the time

he was thoroughly grimy and the workshop smelt like the Biblical
bottomless pit, something would occur to him for Newton.
He could also