The  Undelivered  Letter
 
   SOME YEARS AGO  there lived in an English city a man whom I shall call Fred Armstrong. He worked in the local post office, where he was called the " dead- letter man " because he handled missives whose addresses were faulty or hard to read. He lived in an old house with his little wife, an even smaller daughter and a tiny son. After supper he liked to light his pipe and tell his children of his latest exploits in delivering lost letters. He considered himself quite a detective. There was no cloud on his modest horizon.
   No cloud until one sunny morning when his little boy suddenly fell ill. Within 48 hours the child was dead.
   In his sorrow, Fred Armstrong's soul seemed to die. The mother and their little daughter, Marian, struggled to control their grief, determined to make the best of it. Not so the father. His life was now a dead letter with no direction. In the morning Fred Armstrong rose from his bed and went to work like a sleepwalker, he never spoke unless spoken to , ate his lunch alone, sat like a statue at the supper table and went to bed early. Yet his wife knew that he lay most of the night with eyes open, staring at the ceiling. As the months passed, his apathy seemed to deepen.
   His wife told him that such despair was unfair to their lost son and unfair to the living. But nothing that she said seemed to reach him.
   It was coming close upon Christmas.  One bleak afternoon at work Fred Armstrong sat on his high stool and shoved a new pile of letters under the swinging electric lamp. On the top of the stack was an envelope that was clearly undeliverable. In crude block letters were penciled the words:       " SANTA CLAUS, NORTH POLE "
Armstrong started to throw it away when some impulse made him pause. He opened the letter and read:
 

        Dear  santa ,
   We are very sad at our house this year, and I don't want you to bring me anything. My little brother went to heaven last spring. All I want you to do when you come to our house is to take Brother's toys to him. I'll leave them in the corner by the kitchen stove; his hobby-horse and train and everything. I know he'll be lost up in heaven without them, most of all his horse; he always liked riding it so much, so you must take them to him, please, and you needn't mind leaving me anything, but if you could give Daddy something that would make him like he used to be, make him smoke his pipe again and tell me stories, I do wish you would. I heard him say to Mummie once that only Eternity could cure him. Could you bring him some of that, and I will be your good little girl.
   Marian
   That night Fred Armstrong walked home at faster gait. In the winter darkness he stood in the door yard garden and struck a match. Then as he opened the kitchen door he blew a great puff from his pipe, and the smoke settled like a nimbus around the heads of his startled wife and daughter. And he was smiling at them just as he used to do.
 

           In  page 3  you  will  find  the
 Quotable  Quotes  and  many
 interest .....
                   to  be  continue...