Here
they go into the boxes, red, green, and golden balls, tinkling glass
bells, stars, paper angels, cotton-wool Santa Claus, blue birds,
celluloid goldfish, mosquito netting, counterfeit stockings,
nickel-plated horns, and all the comical accumulation of oddities
that gathers from year to year in the box labelled CHRISTMAS TREE
THINGS, FRAGILE. The box goes up to the attic, and the parent blows
a faint diminuendo, achingly prolonged, on a toy horn. Titania is
almost reduced to tears as he explains it is the halloo of Santa
Claus fading away into the distance.
[Illustration]
GISSING
Our subject, for the moment, is Gissing--and when we say Gissing we
mean not the author of that name, but the dog. He was called Gissing
because he arrived, in the furnace man's poke, on the same day on
which, after long desideration, we were united in holy booklock with
a copy of "By the Ionian Sea."
Gissing needs (as the man said who wrote the preface to Sir Kenelm
Digby's _Closet_) no Rhetoricating Floscules to set him off. He is
(as the man said who wrote a poem about New York) vulgar of manner,
underbred. He is young: his behaviour lacks restraint. Yet there is
in him some lively prescription of that innocent and indivisible
virtue that Nature omitted from men and gave only to Dogs. This is
something that has been the cause of much vile verse in bad poets,
of such gruesome twaddle as Senator Vest's dreadful outbark.
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