We gained the stage together by a short stairway draped with flags.  Mr Felix with a wave of his opera-hat, called on the orchestra to strike up ‘A Fine Old English Gentleman’ (meaning me or, if you like it, Father Christmas:  and I leave you to picture the fool I looked).  Then, stepping to the footlights, he introduced me, explaining that he had met me wandering upstairs, rifling his most secret drawers to fill my bag with seasonable presents for them.  Five or six times he interrupted his patter to pluck a cracker or a bon-bon out of my beard, and toss it down to his audience.  The children gasped at first, and stared at the magic spoil on the floor.  By-and-by one adventurous little girl crept forward, and picked 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