e frosted cake,
Oh, it would be a splendid job
For a mouse to undertake!

To eat a path of sweetmeats
Through candy forest aisles--
Explore the land of Pepper-mint
Stretched out for miles and miles.

To gobble up a cloudlet,
A little cup-cake star,
To swim a lake of liquid sweet
With shores of chocolate bar.

But, best of all the eating,
Would be the toothsome fat,
Triumphant hour of mouse-desire,
To eat a candy cat!

Prayer

Last night I crept across the snow,
Where only tracking rabbits go,
And then I waited quite alone
Until the Christmas radiance shone!

At midnight twenty angels came,
Each white and shining like a flame.
At midnight twenty angels sang,
The stars swung out like bells and rang.

They lifted me across the hill,
They bore me in their arms until
A greater glory greeted them.
It was the town of Bethlehem.

And gently, then, they set me down,
All worshipping that holy town,
And gently, then, they bade me raise
My head to worship and to praise.

And gently, then, the Christ smiled down.
Ah, there was glory in that town!
It was as if the world were free
And glistening with purity.

And in that vault of crystal blue,
It was as if the world were new,
And myriad angels, file on file,
Glorified in the Christ-child's smile.

It was so beautiful to see
Such glory, for a child like me,
So beautiful, it does not seem
It could have been a Christmas dream.

About the author:

John Chipman Farrar (1896-1974), late of the New York publishing firm of
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, attended Yale University where his poem
"Portraits" was the Yale University Prize Poem in 1916. After serving
during the First World War as an intelligence officer with the U.S. Air
Service, Farrar returned to Yale and graduated in 1919. His first book
"Forgotten Shrines" was published late that same year as the second
volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, reprinted in 1971, over half
a century later.

After graduation, Farrar turned to publishing and literary criticism,
editing George H. Doran Company's periodical "The Bookman". Between 1927
and 1929, Farrar was editor at Doubleday, Doran and Company. In mid-
1929, he and two sons of the famous mystery writer Mary Robert Rinehart
start