.

CHRISTMAS PANTOMIME.
I I am sometimes inclined to wonder whether, in very truth, those Polchester Christmases of nearly thirty years ago were so marvellous as now in retrospect they seem.

I can give details of those splendours, facts and figures, that to the onlooker are less than nothing at all--a sugar elephant in a stocking, a box of pencils on a Christmas tree, "Hark, the Herald Angels..." at three in the morning below one's window, a lighted plum-pudding, a postman four hours late, his back bent with bursting parcels.

And it is something further--behind the sugar cherries and the paper caps and the lighted tree--that remains to give magic to those days; a sense of expectancy, a sense of richness, a sense of worship, a visit from the Three Kings who have so seldom come to visit one since.
That Christmas of Jeremy's ninth year was one of the best that he ever had; it was perhaps the last of the MAGICAL Christmases.

After this he was to know too much, was to see Father Christmas vanish before a sum in arithmetic, and a stocking change into something that "boys who go to school never have"-- the last of the Christmases of divine magic, when the snow fell and the waits sang and the stockings were filled and the turkey fattened and the candles blazed and the holly crackled by the will of God rather than the power of man.