"Well," he said slowly, "it's awfully nice to have a dog--anyway."

Such is the true and faithful account of Hamlet's entrance into the
train of the Coles.

CHAPTER III. 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. It would be many years before
he would realise that, after all, in those early days he had been
right...

A very fat book could be written about all that had happened during that
wonderful Christmas, how Hamlet the Dog caught a rat to his own immense
surprise; how the Coles' Christmas dinner was followed by a play acted
with complete success by the junior members of the family, and it was
only Mr. Jellybrand the curate who disapproved; how Aunt Amy had a new
dress in which, by general consent, she looked ridiculous; how Mary,
owing to the foolish kindness of Mrs. Bartholomew, the Precentor's wife,
was introduced to the works of Charlotte Mary Yonge and became quite
impossible in consequence; how Miss Maple had a children's party at
which there was nothing to eat, so that all the children cried with
disappointment, and one small boy (the youngest son of the Precentor)
actually bit Miss Maple; how for two whole days it r