Then he looked at his sisters.

"Well," he said slowly, "it's awfully nice to have a dog--anyway."

Such is the true and faithful account of Hamlet's entrance into the
train of the Coles.




CHAPTER III

CHRISTMAS PANTOMIME


I


I am sometimes inclined to wonder whether, in very truth, those
Polchester Christmases of nearly thirty years ago were so marvellous
as now in retrospect they seem. I can give details of those
splendours, facts and figures, that to the onlooker are less than
nothing at all--a sugar elephant in a stocking, a box of pencils on
a Christmas tree, "Hark, the Herald Angels. . ." at three in the
morning below one's window, a lighted plum- pudding, a postman four
hours late, his back bent with bursting parcels. And it is something
further--behind the sugar cherries and the paper caps and the
lighted tree--that remains to give magic to those days; a sense of
expectancy, a sense of richness, a sense of worship, a visit from
the Three Kings who have so seldom come to visit one since.