oul they were praising came to the unreal
editor's lips, and he quoted aloud to the Easy Chair: "'His love of
goodness was a passion. He would fain have seen all that was fair and
good, and he strove to find it so; and, finding it otherwise, he strove
to make it so.... With no heart for satire, the discord that fell upon
his sensitive ear made itself felt in his dauntless comment upon social
shams and falsehoods.... But he was a lover of peace, and, ... as he was
the ideal gentleman, the ideal citizen, he was also the ideal reformer,
without eccentricity or exaggeration. However high his ideal, it never
parted company with good sense. He never wanted better bread than could
be made of wheat, but the wheat must be kept good and sound,' and I may
add," the unreal editor broke off, "that he did not hurry the unripe
grain to the hopper. He would not have sent all the horses at once to
the abattoir because they made the city noisy and noisome, but would
first have waited till there were automobiles enough to supply their
place."

The Easy Chair caught at the word. "Automobiles?" it echoed.

"Ah, I forgot how long you have been stored," said the unreal editor,
and he explained as well as he could the new mode of motion, and how
already, with its soft rubber galoshes, the automobile had everywhere
stolen a march upon the iron heels of the horses in the city avenues.

He fancied the Easy Chair did not understand, quite, from the
intelligent air with which it eagerly quitted the subject.

"Well," it said at last, "this isn't such a bad time to live in, after
all, it appears. But for a supreme test of your optimism, now, what good
can you find to say of Christmas? What sermon could you preach on that
hackneyed theme which would please the fancy and gladden the heart of
the readers of a Christmas number, where you should make your first
appearance in the Easy Chair?"

To himself the unreal editor had to own that this was a poser. In his
heart he was sick of Christmas: not of the dear and high event, the
greatest in the memory of the world, which it records and embodies, but
the stale and wearisome Christmas of the Christmas presents, purchased
in rage and bestowed in despair; the Christmas of Christmas fiction; the
Christmas of heavy Christmas dinners and indigestions; the Christmas of
all superfluity and surfeit and sentimentality; the Christmas of the
Timminses and the Tiny Tims. But while he thought of these, by operation