Father Christmas
trudging through the snow to the homes of gentle and simple alike
(forgive that stupid, snobbish phrase) was agreeable. But Father
Christmas in red plush breeches, lounging on the doorstep of Sir
Gorgius Midas--one averts one's eyes.

I have--now I come to think of it--another objection to the modern
Christmas. It would be affectation to pretend not to know that
there are many Jews living in England, and in London especially. I
have always had a deep respect for that race, their distinction in
intellect and in character. Being not one of them, I may in their
behalf put a point which themselves would be the last to suggest. I
hope they will acquit me of impertinence in doing this. You, in your
turn, must acquit me of sentimentalism. The Jews are a minority, and
as such must take their chances. But may not a majority refrain from
pressing its rights to the utmost? It is well that we should celebrate
Christmas heartily, and all that. But we could do so without an
emphasis that seems to me, in the circumstances, 'tother side good
taste. "Good taste" is a hateful phrase. But it escaped me in the heat
of the moment. Alas!

THE FEAST

_By_

J*S*PH C*NR*D

The hut in which slept the white man was on a clearing between the
forest and the river. Silence, the silence murmurous and unquiet of a
tropical night, brooded over the hut that, baked through by the sun,
sweated a vapour beneath the cynical light of the stars. Mahamo lay
rigid and watchful at the hut's mouth. In his upturned eyes, and along
the polished surface of his lean body black and immobile, the stars
were reflected, creating an illusion of themselves who are illusions.

The roofs of the congested trees, writhing in some kind of agony
private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the
sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them
with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of
blue steel. Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks
swathed in creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils
venomous, frantic and faint. Down below, by force of habit, the
lush herbage went through the farce of growth--that farce old and
screaming, whose trite end is decomposition.

Within the hut the form of the white man, corpulent and pale, was
covered with a mosquito-net that was itself illusory like everything
else, only more so. Flying squadrons of mosquitoes inside it