"Come," said Time. He turned to speak to me, "Your room is dark. Turn up
the lights. He's used to light, bright light and plenty of it. The dark
has frightened him these three years past."

I turned up the lights and the bright glare revealed all the more
cruelly the tattered figure before us.

Father Christmas advanced a timid step across the floor. Then he paused,
as if in sudden fear.

"Is this floor mined?" he said.

"No, no," said Time soothingly. And to me he added in a murmured
whisper, "He's afraid. He was blown up in a mine in No Man's Land
between the trenches at Christmas-time in 1914. It broke his nerve."

"May I put my toys on that machine gun?" asked Father Christmas timidly.
"It will help to keep them dry."

"It is not a machine gun," said Time gently. "See, it is only a pile of
books upon the sofa." And to me he whispered, "They turned a machine gun
on him in the streets of Warsaw. He thinks he sees them everywhere since
then."

"It's all right, Father Christmas," I said, speaking as cheerily as I
could, while I rose and stirred the fire into a blaze. "There are no
machine guns here and there are no mines. This is but the house of a
poor writer."

"Ah," said Father Christmas, lowering his tattered hat still further and
attempting something of a humble bow, "a writer? Are you Hans Andersen,
perhaps?"

"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,