Free Star of Light by Patricia M. St. John Page A

and the little singers with their bright faces could not see the tree or the candles or the toys they had been given. They had eaten their meal excitedly and danced merrily up and down to the sound of music, and now they were singing with all their hearts. Jenny, sitting in the audience with her parents, felt very sad. If she always had to live in the dark, she was quite certain she would never be happy again. She shut her eyes for a moment and tried to imagine what it would be like to be blind, but it was really too dreadful even to think about, so she opened them again quickly and watched the children.
    They were singing a carol that Jenny herself had learned at school:
    “Star of wonder, star of light,
Star with royal beauty bright,
Westward leading, still proceeding,
Guide us to thy perfect Light.”
    Jenny wondered why they had been taught such words. What was the good of singing about perfect light when they were doomed to spend all their days in darkness? Yet, as she watched them, she had to admit to herself that not one little singer looked unhappy.
    Jenny knew the story of that carol, for they had made a beautiful wall picture of it to decorate the classroom for their Christmas party. Their teacher had stuck on the brightly colored figures—three lurching camels; three wise men with long whitebeards and their treasures of gold, frankincense, and myrrh; a shining star beaming down on a humble little house where a poor woman sat playing with her baby boy.
    Jenny’s mother touched her, and she stopped dreaming and started clapping very loudly so that the blind children would hear how pleased she was. And then it was over, and the children crowded around to say good-bye, touching and feeling and chattering, and the smallest ones were carried away happy and sleepy to bed. But the bigger ones stayed around the doorway to wave and shout to the sound of cars driving away, and that was the last Jenny saw of them.
    She was very quiet on the way home and her mother, thinking she was tired, hurried her up to her room, lit her gas fire, and hustled her into bed. Jenny had been ill, and this had been her first real outing in three months. Her mother had wondered whether she ought to go, but Jenny had insisted, and as usual had her way. Her father had recently joined the council of the blind school, and they had all been invited to the Christmas party.
    Jenny nestled down under her pink comforter and looked at all her Christmas presents—the books, the games, the cozy new dressing gown, the little gold wristwatch, and the travelling case. It had been a good Christmas, and the best present of all—a pony of her own—was down in the stable. For the first time in her rather self-centered life, Jenny suddenly realized that she was really a very fortunate child. She thought of the blind children with the toys theycould not see, and the children in Morocco who had no toys at all and often no food. Her Aunt Rosemary looked after some of them, and had written her an early Christmas letter all about them, and Jenny had been thrilled. It had been like a new, exciting story, giving her a peep into a world she knew nothing about, a world where children like herself went about in rags and earned their own living and slept by themselves out-of-doors—a world where little babies got ill because they didn’t have enough to eat. Jenny adored babies, but the only ones she had ever met had nannies who took care of them, and she had not been allowed to hold them in her arms as she had longed to do. These other babies were probably too poor to have nannies, and perhaps she would be allowed to pick them up.
    The wonderful thing was that in a very short time Jenny would actually see the children that Aunt Rosemary had written about. Only six weeks after Christmas, she and her parents were going by car on a long journey to visit her and her beggar children in the mountains of North Africa.
    The doctor had said that Jenny needed sunshine. She had