“You can see for yourself,” said Ernest, who lived on the first floor, to Roderick who lived on the fourth, “that if Santa Claus can’t get up the front stairs, and can’t get up the back stairs, that all he can do is to come down the chimney.  And he can’t come down the chimney—­at least, he can’t get out of the fireplace.”

“Why not?” asked Roderick, who was busy with an “all-day sucker” and not inclined to take a gloomy view of anything.

“Goosey!” cried Ernest, in great disdain.  “I’ll show you!” and he led Roderick, with his sucker, right into the best parlour, where the fireplace was, and showed him an awful thing.

Of course, to the ordinary observer, there was nothing awful about the fireplace.  Everything in the way of bric-a-brac possessed by the Santa Maria flatters was artistic.  It may have been in the Lease that only people with esthetic tastes were to be admitted to the apartments.  However that may be, the fireplace, with its vases and pictures and trinkets, was something quite wonderful.  Indian incense burned in a mysterious little dish, pictures of purple ladies were hung in odd corners, calendars in letters nobody could read, served to decorate, if not to educate, and glass vases of strange colours and extraordinary shapes stood about filled with roses.  None of these things were awful.  At least no one would have dared say they were.  But what was awful was the formation of the grate.  It was not a hospitable place with andirons, where noble logs of wood could be laid for the burning, nor did it have a generous iron basket where honest anthracite could glow away into the nights.  Not a bit of it.  It held a vertical plate of stuff that looked like dirty cotton wool, on which a tiny blue flame leaped when the gas was turned on and ignited.

“You can see for yourself!” said Ernest tragically.

Roderick could see for himself.  There was an inch-wide opening down which the Friend of the Children could squeeze himself, and, as everybody knows, he needs a good deal of room now, for he has grown portly with age, and his pack every year becomes bigger, owing to the ever-increasing number of girls and boys he has to supply

“Gimini!” said Roderick, and dropped his all-day sucker on the old Bokara rug that Ernest’s mamma had bought the week before at a fashionable furnishing shop, and which had given the sore throat to all the family, owing to some cunning little germs that had come over with the rug to see what American throats were like.

Oh, me, yes! but Roderick could see!  Anybody could see!  And a boy could see better than anybody.

“Let’s go see the Telephone Boy,” said Roderick.  This seemed the wisest thing to do.  When in doubt, all the children went to the Telephone Boy, who was the most fascinating person, with knowledge of the most wonderful kind and of a nature to throw that of Mrs. Scheherazade quite, quite in the shade—­which, considering how long that loquacious lady had been a Shade, is perhaps not surprising.