“Oh, but I’m glad I’m a carol singer,” said Katherine, and slipped and sat down on her lantern in her enthusiasm.
“Have you time to walk over to Division Street with me before we go to Mrs. Salisbury’s?” asked Gladys, as they went down the street. Mrs. Salisbury was the lady who had gathered together the band of carolers to which the Winnebagos belonged, and they were all to meet at her house.
“It’s early yet,” said Hinpoha, “we ought to have time. Come on.”
So they all went with Gladys to deliver a Christmas parcel to a poor family whom Gladys’ mother had taken under her wing. Along the big avenues through which they walked candles were already glimmering in windows in friendly invitation to the coming singers. But there were no candles in the windows on Division Street. The houses were all poor little one-story ones, with never a wreath or a bit of decoration anywhere to show that it was Christmas. The very lamp-posts burned dimly with a discouraged air. The girls delivered their bundle and hastened back up the dark street.
“Let’s stop a minute and sing the songs through once more so Migwan will be sure of them,” suggested Hinpoha. “We wanted to before we left the house, you know, and then we forgot it.”
So they stood still before a bleak, empty looking house, and sang through all the songs they were to sing with the group that night on Garfield Avenue.
In a bare little room in the shabbiest house on Division Street a young girl lay in bed day after day, staring wistfully through the flawed window pane at the dingy row of houses opposite. She suffered from hip disease and could not walk, and a frail little mother cleaned offices to support them both. Living was cruelly high and there was no thought of spending anything for Christmas. Martha dreaded its coming, for she could remember other days when Christmas had been very different. Besides, Martha was very lonely. She and her mother were strangers in town, having come only six months before, and in all that time not a soul had come to see them. And because Martha felt so lonely and so left out of the busy, happy world, the treatment for which she had come to the city was doing her no good, and she was not improving at all. And her mother saw the trouble and sorrowed, but did not know how to mend the matter. Martha read in books about the good times girls had together and longed with all her soul to be part of such frolics, until it seemed that she could not bear her loneliness any longer.