ell-appointed gentleman's house, I reflected, there was
the front door for the gentlemen, and the side door for the tradesmen;
but there was also the top door for the gods. The chimney is,
so to speak, the underground passage between earth and heaven.
By this starry tunnel Santa Claus manages--like the skylark--
to be true to the kindred points of heaven and home.
Nay, owing to certain conventions, and a widely distributed lack
of courage for climbing, this door was, perhaps, little used.
But Santa Claus's door was really the front door:
it was the door fronting the universe.

"I thought this as I groped my way across the black garret, or loft below
the roof, and scrambled down the squat ladder that let us down into a yet
larger loft below. Yet it was not till I was half-way down the ladder that I
suddenly stood still, and thought for an instant of retracing all my steps,
as my companion had retraced them from the beginning of the garden wall.
The name of Santa Claus had suddenly brought me back to my senses.
I remembered why Santa Clause came, and why he was welcome.

"I was brought up in the propertied classes, and with all
their horror of offences against property. I had heard all
the regular denunciations of robbery, both right and wrong;
I had read the Ten Commandments in church a thousand times.
And then and there, at the age of thirty-four, half-way
down a ladder in a dark room in the bodily act of burglar,
I saw suddenly for the first time that theft, after all,
is really wrong.

"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