far into the night, trying
to think out something to write for a Christmas story. And it won't go.
It can't be done--not in these awful days."

"A Christmas Story?"

"Yes. You see, Father Time," I explained, glad with a foolish little
vanity of my trade to be able to tell him something that I thought
enlightening, "all the Christmas stuff--stories and jokes and
pictures--is all done, you know, in October."

I thought it would have surprised him, but I was mistaken.

"Dear me," he said, "not till October! What a rush! How well I remember
in Ancient Egypt--as I think you call it--seeing them getting out their
Christmas things, all cut in hieroglyphics, always two or three years
ahead."

"Two or three years!" I exclaimed.

"Pooh," said Time, "that was nothing. Why in Babylon they used to get
their Christmas jokes ready--all baked in clay--a whole Solar eclipse
ahead of Christmas. They said, I think, that the public preferred them
so."

"Egypt?" I said. "Babylon? But surely, Father Time, there was no
Christmas in those days. I thought--"

"My dear boy," he interrupted gravely, "don't you know that there has
always been Christmas?"

I was silent. Father Time had moved across the room and stood beside the
fireplace, leaning on the mantelpiece. The little wreaths of smoke from
the fading fire seemed to mingle with his shadowy outline.

"Well," he said presently, "what is it that is wrong with Christmas?"

"Why," I answered, "all the romance, the joy, the beauty of it has gone,
crushed and killed by the greed of commerce and the horrors of war. I am
not, as you thought I was, a hundred years old, but I can conjure up,
as anybody can, a picture of Christmas in the good old days of a hundred
years ago: the quaint old-fashioned houses, standing deep among the
evergreens, with the light twinkling from the windows on the snow; the
warmth and comfort within; the great fire roaring on the hearth; the
merry guests grouped about its blaze and the little children with their
eyes dancing in the Christmas fire-light, waiting for Father Christmas
in his fine mummery of red and white and cotton wool to hand the
presents from the yule-tide tree. I can see it," I added, "as if it were
yesterday."

"It was but yesterday," said Father Time, and his voice seemed to soften
with the memory of bygone years. "I remember it well."

"Ah," I continued, "that was Christmas indeed. Give me back such days
as those, with the old good cheer