A Matter of System

At the office of Hawkins & Hawkins, system was everything. Even the trotter-boy was reduced to an orbit that ignored craps and marbles, and the stenographer went about her work like a well-oiled bit of machinery. It is not strange, then, that Jasper Hawkins, senior member of the firm, was particularly incensed at the confusion that Christmas always brought to his home.

For years he bore--with such patience as he could muster--the attack of nervous prostration that regularly, on the 26th day of December, laid his wife upon a bed of invalidism; then, in the face of the unmistakable evidence that the malady would this year precede the holy day of peace and good-will, he burst his bonds of self-control and spoke his mind.

It was upon the morning of the 21st.

"Edith," he began, in what his young daughter called his "now mind" voice, "this thing has got to stop."

"What thing?"

"Christmas."

"Jas-per!"--it was as if she thought he had the power to sweep good-will itself from the earth. "Christmas--stop!"

"Yes. My dear, how did you spend yesterday?"

"I was--shopping."

"Exactly. And the day before?--and the day before that?--and before that? You need n't answer, for I know. And you were shopping for--" he paused expectantly.

"Presents." Something quite outside of herself had forced the answer.

"Exactly. Now, Edith, surely it need not take all your time for a month before Christmas to buy a few paltry presents, and all of it for two months afterward to get over buying them!"

"But, Jasper, they are n't few, and they're anything but paltry. Imagine giving Uncle Harold a paltry present!" retorted Edith, with some spirit.

The man waved an impatient hand.

"Very well, we will call them magnificent, then," he conceded. "But even in that case, surely the countless stores full of beautiful and useful articles, and with a list properly tabulated, and a sufficiency of money--" An expressive gesture finished his sentence.

The woman shook her head.

"I know; it sounds easy," she sighed, "but it is n't. It's so hard to think up what to give, and after I 've thought it up and bought it, I 'm just sure I ought to have got the other thing."

"But you should have some system about it."

"Oh, I had--a list," she replied dispiritedly. "But I'm so--tired."

Jasper Hawkins suddenly squared his shoulders.

"How many names have you left now to buy presents for?" he demanded briskly.

"Three--Aunt Harriet, and Jimmy, and Uncle Harold. They always get left till the last. They're so--impossible."

"Impossible? Nonsense!--and