the sound, but it was rather like that soft complaint of the woody
fibres in a table which disembodied spirits are about to visit, and
which continues to exhale from it till their peculiar vocabulary utters
itself in a staccato of muffled taps. No one who has heard that sound
can mistake it for another, and the unreal editor knew at once that he
confronted in the Easy Chair an animate presence.

"How long have I been here?" it asked, like one wakened from a deep
sleep.

"About eight years," said the unreal editor.

"Ah, I remember," the Easy Chair murmured, and, as the unreal editor
bent forward to pluck away certain sprays of foliage that clung to its
old red back, it demanded, "What is that?"

"Some bits of holly and mistletoe."

"Yes," the Easy Chair softly murmured again. "The last essay he wrote in
me was about Christmas. I have not forgotten one word of it all: how it
began, how it went on, and how it ended! 'In the very promise of the
year appears the hectic of its decay.... The question that we have to
ask, forecasting in these summer days the coming of Christmas which
already shines afar off, is this: whether while we praise Christmas as a
day of general joy we take care to keep it so.... Thackeray describes a
little dinner at the Timminses'. A modest couple make themselves
miserable and spend all their little earnings in order to give a dinner
to people for whom they do not care, and who do not care for them....
Christmas is made miserable to the Timminses because they feel that they
must spend lavishly and buy gifts like their richer neighbors.... You
cannot buy Christmas at the shops, and a sign of friendly sympathy costs
little.... Should not the extravagance of Christmas cause every honest
man and woman practically to protest by refusing to yield to the
extravagance?' There!" the Easy Chair broke off from quoting, "that was
Curtis! The kind and reasonable mood, the righteous conscience incarnate
in the studied art, the charming literary allusion for the sake of the
unliterary lesson, the genial philosophy--

'not too good
For human nature's daily food'--

the wisdom alike of the closet and the public square, the large patience
and the undying hopefulness! Do you think," the Easy Chair said, with a
searching severity one would not have expected of it, "that you are fit
to take his place?"

In evasion of this hard question the unreal editor temporized with the
eff