Judge — December 16, 1905 — page 9: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

OLKS who don’t believe in Santa Claus need not worry. The poor old mythical person is having a hard time of it without their crusade and will be wom out and dead soon enough. To begin with, he is up again@ it in the matter of the modem city. The old rural setting is gone. A foot of snow on the ground, a roaring wind howl- ing down out of the woods or mountains and shouting round the big, lonely house—that fits old Santa and makes him look reasonable. But his bunch of reindeer don’t seem to match up with a sloppy, mushy street, where the trolley hummeth merrily, and anon the auto chuggeth through the slush. Even the children get disgusted and give him up. Then there is the chimney. The old wide chimney where the swallow camped and with the wind made eerie noises in the night fairly demanded a Santa Claus. When the wind sucked up the roaring flames from among the logs and the shadows leaped across the ceiling and made fan- tastic, fleeting shapes dance upon the walls, and the snow pelted the window-panes, and out at the bam the dogs barked while the white wraith of the storm moved across the meadows, then Santa Claus could come with some show of reason. But where is he now, with all our mod- em conveniences? How would he crawl up through the register in the floor, even if he could get down a three-by- four pot-chimney and through the fumace! And worse yet, how would he ever, ever work his way through the radiator! Think of Santa Claus squirming up through the hot-water pipes into the tenth-floor flat! The flat itself is a discourager sufficient to kill off the old saint from the north. COPYMIENT 1904 BY JUOSE COMPANY PUBLISHERS, 226 FOURTH AVL. wEW YORK, SANTA-CiAY Never fear, folks; Kriss Kringle will die out of our stuffy little steam-heated world soon enough. It takes a powerful imagination to keep him here now. In fact, to tell the children the old Santa Claus story seems so much like lying, so unreasonable, so out of keeping with the facts, that many have given it up long ago. But in spite of all, and even if we must lie about it, folks, don’t be in too big a hurry to rush the old saint of childhood to the exits. Some lies are a million times better than the truth—as some dry-as-dust conceives it—and for ourselves we don’t propose to let Santa Claus go until we have to. Wee are going to insift that somewhere in that most useless spot on the footstool, the North Pole, the big, white-whiskered, jolly gent on the night before Christmas will load up that wonderful sleigh and hitch those beautiful reindeer to it and crack his whip and away they will go, running with the night winds that will whistle desolately over many a wintry waste. We are going to claim that somehow he clambers through, reindeer, sleigh and all, and even gets into the tenth-floor flat with the steam-heat, where little pale faces dream of his coming. We shall maintain against all comers that the jolly saint goes laugh- ing round the world in a single night, and the child who does not hear his bells and dream of the blustering old gent who fills the great cold whiteness of the outdoor earth with his gentle love and kindly thoughtfulness has missed something that will leave him poorer than he has a right to be. We shall do this because the myth in its folly is wiser than the wisdom that declaims against it. We prefer to believe that there is somebody besides ourself afoot on Christmas night, and every night, for that matter, with kindly intent toward all that sleep. Sache Wibols Limo Prg Co NewYork comicbooks.com