“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. I carry some of the greatest with me always. I have them here—”
He began fumbling among the limp and tattered packages that he carried. “Look! The House that Jack Built—a marvellous, deep thing, sir—and this, The Babes in the Wood. Will you take it, sir? A poor present, but a present still—not so long ago I gave them in thousands every Christmas-time. None seem to want them now.”
He looked appealingly towards Father Time, as the weak may look towards the strong, for help and guidance.
“None want them now,” he repeated, and I could see the tears start in his eyes. “Why is it so? 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.”
Old Christmas seated himself beside the fire, his hands outstretched towards the flames. Something of his old-time cheeriness seemed to flicker across his features as he warmed himself at the blaze.
“That’s better,” he murmured. “I was cold, sir, cold, chilled to the bone. Of old I never felt it so; no matter what the wind, the world seemed warm about me. Why is it not so now?”
“You see,” said Time, speaking low in a whisper for my ear alone, “how sunk and broken he is? Will you not help?”
“Gladly,” I answered, “if I can.”