II.

The old doctor’s boots were very bad--those old boots which Middleburgh knew as well as they knew Nancy Pansy’s eyes or the church steeple. Mrs. Seddon had taken the trouble to scold him one day in the autumn when she heard him coughing, and she had sent him a small roll of money “on account,” she wrote him, “of a long bill,” to get a pair of new boots. The old doctor never sent in a bill; he would as soon have sent a small-pox patient into Nancy Pansy’s play-room. He calmly returned the money, saying he never transacted business with women who had husbands, and that he had always dressed to suit himself, at which Mrs. Seddon laughed; for, like the rest of Middleburgh, she knew that those old boots never stood back for any weather, however bad. She arranged, however, to have a little money sent to him through the post-office from another town without any name to the letter enclosing it. But the old boots were still worn, and Nancy Pansy, at her mother’s suggestion, learned to knit, that she might have a pair of yarn socks knit for the old doctor at Christmas. She intended to have kept this a secret, and she did keep it from every one but the doctor; she did not quite _tell_ even him, but she could not help making him “guess” about it. Christmas Eve she went over to the old doctor’s, and whilst she made him shut his eyes, hung up his stocking herself, into which she poked a new pair of very queer-shaped yarn socks, a little black in some places from her little hands, for they were just done, and there had not been time to wash them. She consulted the old doctor to know if he really--really, “now, really”--thought Santa Claus would bring her a doll “through the war;” but she could only get a “perhaps” out of him, for he said he had not heard from Harry.

It was about ten o’clock that night when the old doctor came home from his round of visits, and opening his old secretary, took out a long thin bundle wrapped in paper, and slipping it into his pocket, went out again into the snow which was falling. Old Limpid, the doctor’s man, had taken Slouch to the stable, so the old doctor walked, stumbling around through the dark by the gate, thinking with a sigh of his boy Harry, who would just have vaulted over the palings, and who was that night sleeping in the snow somewhere. However, he smiled when he put the bundle into Nancy Pansy’s long stocking, and he smiled again when he put his old worn boots to the fire and warmed his feet. But when Nancy Pansy slipped next morning through her “little doctor’s-gate,” as she called her hole in the fence, and burst into his room before he was out of bed, to show him with dancing eyes what Santa Claus had brought her, and announced that she had “named her ‘Harry,’ all herself,” the old doctor had to wipe his eyes before he could really see her.

Harry was the first “real doll” Nancy Pansy had ever had--that was what she said--and Harry soon became as well known in Middleburgh as Nancy Pansy herself. She used to accompany Nancy Pansy and the old doctor on their rounds, and instead of the latter two being called “the twins,” they and Harry were now dubbed “the triplets.” It was astonishing what an influence Harry came to have on Nancy Pansy’s life. She carried her everywhere, and the doll would frequently be seen sitting up in the old doctor’s buggy alone, whilst Slouch dozed in the sun outside of some patient’s door. Of course, so much work as Harry had to do had the effect of marring her freshness a good deal, and she met with one or two severe accidents, such as breaking her leg, and cracking her neck; but the old doctor attended her in the gravest way, and performed such successful operations that really she was, except as to looks, almost as good as new; besides, as Nancy Pansy explained, dolls had to have measles and “theseases” just like other folks.