Hogfather

heard a brief snatch of conversation.
    “It just ain’t that simple, master, that’s all I’m saying—”
    I T IS BETTER TO GIVE THAN TO RECEIVE , A LBERT .
    “No, master, it’s just a lot more expensive. You can’t just go around—”
    Things rained down on the snow.
    The beggars looked at them. Arnold Sideways carefully picked up a sugar pig and bit its nose off. Foul Ole Ron peered suspiciously into a cracker that had bounced off his hat, and then shook it against his ear.
    The Duck Man opened a bag of sweets.
    “Ah, humbugs?” he said.
    Coffin Henry unlooped a string of sausages from around his neck.
    “Buggrit?” said Foul Ole Ron.
    “It’s a cracker,” said the dog, scratching its ear. “You pull it.”
    Ron waved the cracker aimlessly by one end.
    “Oh, give it here,” said the dog, and gripped the other end in its teeth.
    “My word,” said the Duck Man, fishing in a snow drift. “Here’s a whole roast pig! And a big dish of roast potatoes, miraculously uncracked! And…look…isn’t this caviar in the jar? Asparagus! Potted shrimp! My goodness! What were we going to have for Hogswatch dinner, Arnold?”
    “Old boots,” said Arnold. He opened a fallen box of cigars and licked them.
    “Just old boots?”
    “Oh, no. Stuffed with mud, and with roast mud. ’s good mud, too. I bin saving it up.”
    “Now we can have a merry feast of goose!”
    “All right. Can we stuff it with old boots?”
    There was a pop from the direction of the cracker. They heard Foul Ole Ron’s thinking-brain dog growl.
    “No, no, no, you put the hat on your head and you read the hum’rous mottar .”
    “Millennium hand and shrimp?” said Ron, passing the scrap of paper to the Duck Man. The Duck Man was regarded as the intellectual of the group.
    He peered at the motto.
    “Ah, yes, let’s see now…It says ‘Help Help Help Ive Fallen in the Crakker Machine I Cant Keep Runin on this Roller Please Get me Ou—’” He turned the paper over a few times. “That appears to be it, except for the stains.”
    “Always the same ole mottars,” said the dog. “Someone slap Ron on the back, will you? If he laughs any more he’ll—oh, he has. Oh, well, nothing new about that.”
    The beggars spent a few more minutes picking up hams, jars and bottles that had settled on the snow. They packed them around Arnold on his trolley and set off down the street.
    “How come we got all this?”
    “’s Hogswatch, right?”
    “Yeah, but who hung up their stocking?”
    “I don’t think we’ve got any, have we?”
    “I hung up an old boot.”
    “Does that count?”
    “Dunno. Ron ate it.”

    I’m waiting for the Hogfather, thought Ponder Stibbons. I’m in the dark waiting for the Hogfather. Me. A believer in Natural Philosophy. I can find the square root of 27.4 in my head. * I shouldn’t be doing this.
    It’s not as if I’ve hung a stocking up. There’d be some point if…
    He sat rigid for a moment, and then pulled off his pointy sandal and rolled down a sock. It helped if you thought of it as the scientific testing of an interesting hypothesis.
    From out of the darkness Ridcully said, “How long, do you think?”
    “It’s generally believed that all deliveries are completed well before midnight,” said Ponder, and tugged hard.
    “Are you all right, Mr. Stibbons?”
    “Fine, sir. Fine. Er…do you happen to have a drawing pin about you? Or a small nail, perhaps?”
    “I don’t believe so.”
    “Oh, it’s all right. I’ve found a penknife.”
    After a while Ridcully heard a faint scratching noise in the dark.
    “How do you spell ‘electricity,’ sir?”
    Ridcully thought for a while. “You know, I don’t think I ever do.”
    There was silence again, and then a clang. The Librarian grunted in his sleep.
    “What are you doing?”
    “I just knocked over the coal shovel.”
    “Why are you feeling around on the mantelpiece?”
    “Oh, just…you know, just…just looking. A little…experiment. After all, you never know.”
    “You never know what?”
    “Just…never know, you know.”
    “ Sometimes you know,” said Ridcully. “I think I know quite a lot that I didn’t used to know. It’s amazing what you do end up knowing, I sometimes think. I often wonder what new stuff I’ll know.”
    “Well, you never know.”
    “That’s a fact.”

    High over the city Albert turned to Death, who seemed to be trying to avoid his gaze.
    “You didn’t get that stuff out of the sack! Not cigars