riddles will have been read; the lights will have perished off the dark green boughs; the toys growing on them will have been distributed, fought for, cherished, neglected, broken.  Ferdinand and Fidelia will each keep out of it (be still, my gushing heart!) the remembrance of a riddle read together, of a double-almond munched together, and the moiety of an exploded cracker. . . .  The maids, I say, will have taken down all that holly stuff and nonsense about the clocks, lamps, and looking-glasses, the dear boys will be back at school, fondly thinking of the pantomime-fairies whom they have seen; whose gaudy gossamer wings are battered by this time; and whose pink cotton (or silk is it?) lower extremities are all dingy and dusty.  Yet but a few days, Bob, and flakes of paint will have cracked off the fairy flower-bowers, and the revolving temples of adamantine lustre will be as shabby as the city of Pekin.  When you read this, will Clown still be going on lolling his tongue out of his month, and saying, “How are you to-morrow?” Tomorrow, indeed!  He must be almost ashamed of himself (if that cheek is still capable of the blush of shame) for asking the absurd question.  To-morrow, indeed!  To-morrow the diffugient snows will give place to Spring; the snowdrops will lift their heads; Ladyday may be expected, and the pecuniary duties peculiar to that feast; in place of bonbons, trees will have an eruption of light green knobs; the whitebait season will bloom . . . as if one need go on describing these vernal phenomena, when Christmas is still here, though ending, and the subject of my discourse!

We have all admired the illustrated papers, and noted how boisterously jolly they become at Christmas time.  What wassail-bowls, robin-redbreasts, waits, snow landscapes, bursts of Christmas song!  And then to think that these festivities are prepared months before—­that these Christmas pieces are prophetic!  How kind of artists and poets to devise the festivities beforehand, and serve them pat at the proper time!  We ought to be grateful to them, as to the cook who gets up at midnight and sets the pudding a-boiling, which is to feast us at six o’clock.  I often think with gratitude of the famous Mr. Nelson Lee—­the author of I don’t know how many hundred glorious pantomimes—­walking by the summer wave at Margate, or Brighton perhaps, revolving in his mind the idea of some new gorgeous spectacle of faery, which the winter shall see complete.  He is like cook at midnight (si parva licet).  He watches and thinks.  He pounds the sparkling sugar of benevolence, the plums of fancy, the sweetmeats of fun, the figs of—­well, the figs of fairy fiction, let us say, and pops the whole in the seething caldron of imagination, and at due season serves up the pantomime.

Very few men in the course of nature can expect to see all the pantomimes in one season, but I hope to the end of my life I shall never forego reading about them in that delicious sheet of The Times which appears on the morning after Boxing-day.  Perhaps reading is even better than seeing.  The best way, I think, is to say you are ill, lie in bed, and have the paper for two hours, reading all the way down from Drury Lane to the Britannia at Hoxton.  Bob and I went to two pantomimes.  One was at the Theatre of Fancy, and the other at the Fairy Opera, and I don’t know which we liked the best.