Stephen Leacock

“ Has the world forgotten its sympathy with the lost children wandering in the wood?"
"All the world," I heard Time murmur with a sigh, "is wandering in the wood." But out loud he spoke to Father Christmas in cheery admonition, "Tut, tut, good Christmas," he said, "you must cheer up. Here, sit in this chair the biggest one; so — beside the fire. Let us stir it to a blaze; more wood, that's better. And listen, good old Friend, to the wind outside — almost a Christmas wind, is it not? Merry and boisterous enough, for all the evil times it stirs among." ”

“ You have had, I do not doubt, good reader, more than once that strange uncanny feeling that there is some one unseen standing beside you, in a darkened room, let us say, with a dying fire, when the night has grown late, and the October wind sounds low outside, and when, through the thin curtain that we call Reality, the Unseen World starts for a moment clear upon our dreaming sense. ”

“ I said, speaking as cheerily as I could, while I rose and stirred the fire into a blaze.
"There are no machine guns here and there are no mines. This is but the house of a poor writer."
"Ah," said Father Christmas, lowering his tattered hat still further and attempting something of a humble bow, "a writer? Are you Hans Andersen, perhaps?"
"Not quite," I answered.
"But a great writer, I do not doubt," said the old man, with a humble courtesy that he had learned, it well may be, centuries ago in the yule-tide season of his northern home. "The world owes much to its great books. ”

“ You must not let them know — the children. The cruelty and the horror and the hate that racks the world to-day — keep it from them. Some day he will know" — here Time pointed to the prostrate form of Father Christmas — "that his children, that once were, have not died in vain: that from their sacrifice shall come a nobler, better world for all to live in, a world where countless happy children shall hold bright their memory for ever. But for the children of To-day, save and spare them all you can from the evil hate and horror of the war. ”

“ Turn up the lights. He's used to light, bright light and plenty of it. The dark has frightened him these three years past."
I turned up the lights and the bright glare revealed all the more cruelly the tattered figure before us.
Father Christmas advanced a timid step across the floor. Then he paused, as if in sudden fear.
"Is this floor mined?" he said.
"No, no," said Time soothingly. And to me he added in a murmured whisper, "He's afraid. He was blown up in a mine in No Man's Land between the trenches at Christmas-time in 1914. It broke his nerve."
"May I put my toys on that machine gun?" ”