The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus

Description

Have you heard of the great Forest of Burzee? Nurse used to sing of it when I was achild. She sang of the big tree-trunks, standing close together, with their roots intertwiningbelow the earth and their branches intertwining above it; of their rough coating of bark andqueer, gnarled limbs; of the bushy foliage that roofed the entire forest, save where thesunbeams found a path through which to touch the ground in little spots and to cast weirdand curious shadows over the mosses, the lichens and the drifts of dried leaves.The Forest of Burzee is mighty and grand and awesome to those who steal beneath itsshade. Coming from the sunlit meadows into its mazes it seems at first gloomy, thenpleasant, and afterward filled with never-ending delights.For hundreds of years it has flourished in all its magnificence, the silence of its inclosureunbroken save by the chirp of busy chipmunks, the growl of wild beasts and the songs ofbirds.Yet Burzee has its inhabitants-for all this. Nature peopled it in the beginning withFairies, Knooks, Ryls and Nymphs. As long as the Forest stands it will be a home, a refugeand a playground to these sweet immortals, who revel undisturbed in its depths.Civilization has never yet reached Burzee. Will it ever, I wonder?