CHAPTER I

I had a vexing dream one night, not long ago: it was about a fortnight after Christmas.  I dreamt I flew out of the window in my nightshirt.  I went up and up.  I was glad that I was going up.  “They have been noticing me,” I thought to myself.  “If anything, I have been a bit too good.  A little less virtue and I might have lived longer.  But one cannot have everything.”  The world grew smaller and smaller.  The last I saw of London was the long line of electric lamps bordering the Embankment; later nothing remained but a faint luminosity buried beneath darkness.  It was at this point of my journey that I heard behind me the slow, throbbing sound of wings.

I turned my head.  It was the Recording Angel.  He had a weary look; I judged him to be tired.

“Yes,” he acknowledged, “it is a trying period for me, your Christmas time.”

“I am sure it must be,” I returned; “the wonder to me is how you get through it all.  You see at Christmas time,” I went on, “all we men and women become generous, quite suddenly.  It is really a delightful sensation.”

“You are to be envied,” he agreed.

“It is the first Christmas number that starts me off,” I told him; “those beautiful pictures—the sweet child looking so pretty in her furs, giving Bovril with her own dear little hands to the shivering street arab; the good old red-faced squire shovelling out plum pudding to the crowd of grateful villagers.  It makes me yearn to borrow a collecting box and go round doing good myself.

“And it is not only me—I should say I,” I continued; “I don’t want you to run away with the idea that I am the only good man in the world.  That’s what I like about Christmas, it makes everybody good.  The lovely sentiments we go about repeating! the noble deeds we do! from a little before Christmas up to, say, the end of January! why noting them down must be a comfort to you.”

“Yes,” he admitted, “noble deeds are always a great joy to me.”

“They are to all of us,” I said; “I love to think of all the good deeds I myself have done.  I have often thought of keeping a diary—jotting them down each day.  It would be so nice for one’s children.”

He agreed there was an idea in this.

“That book of yours,” I said, “I suppose, now, it contains all the good actions that we men and women have been doing during the last six weeks?”  It was a bulky looking volume.

Yes, he answered, they were all recorded in the book.