door into the
darkness.

"Dick," he roared at the top of his voice; "he's still alive."

.....

Another shadow darkened the doorway, and a much larger and more
full-blooded gentleman in an enormous periwig came in, fanning his
flushed face with a military hat of the cut of Queen Anne. He carried
his head well back like a soldier, and his hot face had even a look
of arrogance, which was suddenly contradicted by his eyes, which were
literally as humble as a dog's. His sword made a great clatter, as if
the shop were too small for it.

"Indeed," said Sir Richard Steele, "'tis a most prodigious matter,
for the man was dying when I wrote about Sir Roger de Coverley and his
Christmas Day."

My senses were growing dimmer and the room darker. It seemed to be
filled with newcomers.

"It hath ever been understood," said a burly man, who carried his head
humorously and obstinately a little on one side--I think he was Ben
Jonson--"It hath ever been understood, consule Jacobo, under our King
James and her late Majesty, that such good and hearty customs were
fallen sick, and like to pass from the world. This grey beard most
surely was no lustier when I knew him than now."

And I also thought I heard a green-clad man, like Robin Hood, say in
some mixed Norman French, "But I saw the man dying."

"I have felt like this a long time," said Father Christmas, in his
feeble way again.

Mr. Charles Dickens suddenly leant across to him.

"Since when?" he asked. "Since you were born?"

"Yes," said the old man, and sank shaking into a chair. "I have been
always dying."

Mr. Dickens took off his hat with a flourish like a man calling a mob to
rise.

"I understand it now," he cried, "you will never die."

XXXVIII. The Ballade of a Strange Town

My friend and I, in fooling about Flanders, fell into a fixed affection
for the town of Mechlin or Malines. Our rest there was so restful that
we almost felt it as a home, and hardly strayed out of it.

We sat day after day in the market-place, under little trees growing
in wooden tubs, and looked up at the noble converging lines of the
Cathedral tower, from which the three riders from Ghent, in the poem,
heard the bell which told them they were not too late. But we took as
much pleasure in the people, in the little boys with open, flat
Flemish faces and fur collars round their necks, making them look
like burgomasters; or the women, whose prim, oval faces, hair strained
tightly