“It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed the strangely soft footsteps of my huge companion across the lower and larger loft, till he knelt down on a part of the bare flooring and, after a few fumbling efforts, lifted a sort of trapdoor.  This released a light from below, and we found ourselves looking down into a lamp-lit sitting room, of the sort that in large houses often leads out of a bedroom, and is an adjunct to it.  Light thus breaking from beneath our feet like a soundless explosion, showed that the trapdoor just lifted was clogged with dust and rust, and had doubtless been long disused until the advent of my enterprising friend.  But I did not look at this long, for the sight of the shining room underneath us had an almost unnatural attractiveness.  To enter a modern interior at so strange an angle, by so forgotten a door, was an epoch in one’s psychology.  It was like having found a fourth dimension.

“My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so suddenly and soundlessly, that I could do nothing but follow him; though, for lack of practice in crime, I was by no means soundless.  Before the echo of my boots had died away, the big burglar had gone quickly to the door, half opened it, and stood looking down the staircase and listening.  Then, leaving the door still half open, he came back into the middle of the room, and ran his roving blue eye round its furniture and ornament.  The room was comfortably lined with books in that rich and human way that makes the walls seem alive; it was a deep and full, but slovenly, bookcase, of the sort that is constantly ransacked for the purposes of reading in bed.  One of those stunted German stoves that look like red goblins stood in a corner, and a sideboard of walnut wood with closed doors in its lower part.  There were three windows, high but narrow.  After another glance round, my housebreaker plucked the walnut doors open and rummaged inside.  He found nothing there, apparently, except an extremely handsome cut-glass decanter, containing what looked like port.  Somehow the sight of the thief returning with this ridiculous little luxury in his hand woke within me once more all the revelation and revulsion I had felt above.

“`Don’t do it!’ I cried quite incoherently, `Santa Claus—­’

“`Ah,’ said the burglar, as he put the decanter on the table and stood looking at me, `you’ve thought about that, too.’

“`I can’t express a millionth part of what I’ve thought of,’ I cried, `but it’s something like this... oh, can’t you see it?  Why are children not afraid of Santa Claus, though he comes like a thief in the night?  He is permitted secrecy, trespass, almost treachery—­because there are more toys where he has been.  What should we feel if there were less?  Down what chimney from hell would come the goblin that should take away the children’s balls and dolls while they slept?  Could a Greek tragedy be more gray and cruel than that daybreak and awakening?  Dog-stealer, horse-stealer, man-stealer—­can you think of anything so base as a toy-stealer?’