ed up a cracker, and
her cry of delight as she discovered that it was real, gave the
signal for a general scramble. Mr Felix continued his patter without
seeming to heed it: but his hand went up faster and faster to my
beard and wig, and soon the crackers were falling in showers.
I saw children snatch them off the floor and carry them to their
blind brothers and sisters, pressing them between the wondering,
groping hands with assurance that they were real. . . . Mr Felix saw
it too, and his flow of words ceased with a gulp, as though a
flowing spring gurgled suddenly and withdrew itself underground.
'I am a sentimentalist,' he said to me quickly, in a pause which
nobody heeded; for by this time crackers were banging to right and
left, and the children shouting together. Their shouts rose to one
yell of laughter as, recovering himself, he dived at my neck, and
produced the two struggling rabbits. His opera-hat opened with a
snap, and in they went. A second later it shut flat again, and they
were gone, into thin air. He opened the hat with a puzzled frown,
plunged a hand, and dragged forth yard upon yard of ribbon--red,
green, white, blue, yellow ribbon, mixed up with packs of playing
cards that, with a turn of the hand he sent spinning into air, to
fall thick as leaves in Vallombrosa.

'Your turn!' he panted as, at the end of the ribbon he lugged out an
enormous cabbage, and trundled it down the room. Catching my bag
from me, he shook his cloak over it once, and returned it to my
hands, bulging, stuffed full to the brim with toys--dolls, tops,
whips, trumpets, boxes of animals, boxes of tin soldiers. . . .

'Father Christmas, now! Make way for Father Christmas!'

The infection took me, and stumbling down from the stage by the
stairway, I fell to distributing the largesse left and right.
The first bagful carried me less than a third of the way down the
room: for I gave with both hands, and, when a blind child fumbled
long with a toy, dropped it at his feet, and tried another, and yet
another till his smile suited me. The dropped toys lay where they
had fallen. The spirit of the game had made me reckless; and I
halted with a cold shiver as my fingers touched the gems at the
bottom of the bag, and, looking down the room, I was aware that my
store was exhausted, and as yet two-thirds of the children had
received no gift. I turned--all in a cold shiver--to retrace my
steps and pick up the toys at the blind child