afternoon for a treat, and was afterwards replaced in a high
corner-cupboard that always attracted Michael's extreme curiosity and
was the object of many vows to solve its secret, when he grew bigger.
All these presents came from his mother together with half a dozen
books. He received no other presents except from the household. Nurse
gave him a china house, romantic when illuminated by a night-light;
Annie shyly placed before him a crystal globe that when shaken gave a
wonderful reproduction of a snow-storm falling upon a weather-worn tin
figure with a green face, blue legs and an unpainted coat. Mrs. Frith
the cook gave him a box of tops, none of which he or she or anyone else
could spin. In addition to these presents Santa Claus allowed him on a
still December night an orange, an apple, a monkey on a stick, five nuts
(three of them bad) and a selection of angular sweets. As Michael with
foresight had hung up two of Nurse's stockings as well as his own socks,
he felt slightly resentful towards Santa Claus for the meagre response.

Christmas passed away in a week of extravagant rain, and a visit was
paid to the pantomime of Valentine and Orson at the Surrey Theatre that
reduced Michael to a state of collapse owing to the fight between the
two protagonists, in which Orson's fingers were lacerated by the
glittering sword of Valentine. Nurse vainly assured him the blood was so
much red paint. He howled the louder and dreamed ghastly dreams for a
month afterwards.

About this time Michael read many books in a strange assortment. Nurse
had a collection of about a dozen in her trunk from which Michael was
allowed to read three to himself. These were The Lamplighter, The
Arabian Nights in a small paper-bound volume of diminutive print, and a
Tale of the Black Rising in Jamaica which included an earthquake. In The
Arabian Nights he read over and over again the stories of Aladdin, The
Forty Thieves and Sinbad, owing to their familiarity through earlier
narratives. On Sunday afternoons Nurse always read aloud from
Baring-Gould's Lives of the Saints and Mrs. Gatti's Parables from
Nature, and told the story of Father Machonochie's death in Argyll and
of his faithful Skye terriers, whose portraits she piously possessed in
Oxford frames. Michael's own books included at this period several
zoological works, the Swiss Family Robinson, Holiday House,
Struwwelpeter, Daddy Darwin's Dovecote, Jackanapes, The Battles of the
British Army