Some Christmas Stories | Page 5

staircase), it was but to shut it up again, and I could
believe. Even open, there were three distinct rooms in it: a sitting-room
and bed-room, elegantly furnished, and best of all, a kitchen, with
uncommonly soft fire- irons, a plentiful assortment of diminutive
utensils--oh, the warming-pan!--and a tin man-cook in profile, who was
always going to fry two fish. What Barmecide justice have I done to the
noble feasts wherein the set of wooden platters figured, each with its
own peculiar delicacy, as a ham or turkey, glued tight on to it, and
garnished with something green, which I recollect as moss! Could all
the Temperance Societies of these later days, united, give me such a
tea-drinking as I have had through the means of yonder little set of blue
crockery, which really would hold liquid (it ran out of the small
wooden cask, I recollect, and tasted of matches), and which made tea,
nectar. And if the two legs of the ineffectual little sugar-tongs did
tumble over one another, and want purpose, like Punch's hands, what
does it matter? And if I did once shriek out, as a poisoned child, and

strike the fashionable company with consternation, by reason of having
drunk a little teaspoon, inadvertently dissolved in too hot tea, I was
never the worse for it, except by a powder!
Upon the next branches of the tree, lower down, hard by the green
roller and miniature gardening-tools, how thick the books begin to hang.
Thin books, in themselves, at first, but many of them, and with
deliciously smooth covers of bright red or green. What fat black letters
to begin with! "A was an archer, and shot at a frog." Of course he was.
He was an apple-pie also, and there he is! He was a good many things
in his time, was A, and so were most of his friends, except X, who had
so little versatility, that I never knew him to get beyond Xerxes or
Xantippe--like Y, who was always confined to a Yacht or a Yew Tree;
and Z condemned for ever to be a Zebra or a Zany. But, now, the very
tree itself changes, and becomes a bean-stalk--the marvellous
bean-stalk up which Jack climbed to the Giant's house! And now, those
dreadfully interesting, double-headed giants, with their clubs over their
shoulders, begin to stride along the boughs in a perfect throng,
dragging knights and ladies home for dinner by the hair of their heads.
And Jack--how noble, with his sword of sharpness, and his shoes of
swiftness! Again those old meditations come upon me as I gaze up at
him; and I debate within myself whether there was more than one Jack
(which I am loth to believe possible), or only one genuine original
admirable Jack, who achieved all the recorded exploits.
Good for Christmas-time is the ruddy colour of the cloak, in which--
the tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through, with her
basket--Little Red Riding-Hood comes to me one Christmas Eve to
give me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling
Wolf who ate her grandmother, without making any impression on his
appetite, and then ate her, after making that ferocious joke about his
teeth. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little
Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to
be; and there was nothing for it but to look out the Wolf in the Noah's
Ark there, and put him late in the procession on the table, as a monster
who was to be degraded. O the wonderful Noah's Ark! It was not found
seaworthy when put in a washing-tub, and the animals were crammed

in at the roof, and needed to have their legs well shaken down before
they could be got in, even there-- and then, ten to one but they began to
tumble out at the door, which was but imperfectly fastened with a wire
latch--but what was THAT against it! Consider the noble fly, a size or
two smaller than the elephant: the lady-bird, the butterfly--all triumphs
of art! Consider the goose, whose feet were so small, and whose
balance was so indifferent, that he usually tumbled forward, and
knocked down all the animal creation. Consider Noah and his family,
like idiotic tobacco-stoppers; and how the leopard stuck to warm little
fingers; and how the tails of the larger animals used gradually to
resolve themselves into frayed bits of string!
Hush! Again a forest, and somebody up in a tree--not Robin Hood, not
Valentine, not the Yellow Dwarf (I have passed him and all Mother
Bunch's wonders, without mention), but an Eastern King with a
glittering scimitar and turban. By Allah! two Eastern Kings, for I see