nt; he was
blue with distance. The black doll was really a negro relieved against
passionate tropic foliage in the land where every weed is flaming and
only man is black. The red Noah's ark was really the enormous ship
of earthly salvation riding on the rain-swollen sea, red in the first
morning of hope.

Every one, I suppose, knows such stunning instants of abstraction, such
brilliant blanks in the mind. In such moments one can see the face
of one's own best friend as an unmeaning pattern of spectacles or
moustaches. They are commonly marked by the two signs of the slowness of
their growth and the suddenness of their termination. The return to real
thinking is often as abrupt as bumping into a man. Very often indeed
(in my case) it is bumping into a man. But in any case the awakening is
always emphatic and, generally speaking, it is always complete. Now, in
this case, I did come back with a shock of sanity to the consciousness
that I was, after all, only staring into a dingy little toy-shop; but
in some strange way the mental cure did not seem to be final. There
was still in my mind an unmanageable something that told me that I had
strayed into some odd atmosphere, or that I had already done some odd
thing. I felt as if I had worked a miracle or committed a sin. It was as
if I had at any rate, stepped across some border in the soul.

To shake off this dangerous and dreamy sense I went into the shop and
tried to buy wooden soldiers. The man in the shop was very old and
broken, with confused white hair covering his head and half his face,
hair so startlingly white that it looked almost artificial. Yet though
he was senile and even sick, there was nothing of suffering in his
eyes; he looked rather as if he were gradually falling asleep in a not
unkindly decay. He gave me the wooden soldiers, but when I put down the
money he did not at first seem to see it; then he blinked at it feebly,
and then he pushed it feebly away.

"No, no," he said vaguely. "I never have. I never have. We are rather
old-fashioned here."

"Not taking money," I replied, "seems to me more like an uncommonly new
fashion than an old one."

"I never have," said the old man, blinking and blowing his nose; "I've
always given presents. I'm too old to stop."

"Good heavens!" I said. "What can you mean? Why, you might be Father
Christmas."

"I am Father Christmas," he said apologetically, and blew his nose
again.

The lamps could not have been ligh