【英文原著类】The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus(圣诞老人之行).pdf

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus
The Life and
Adventures of Santa Claus
by L. Frank Baum
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The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus
YOUTH
1. Burzee
Have you heard of the great Forest of Burzee? Nurse used to sing of
it when I was a child. She sang of the big tree-trunks, standing close
together, with their roots intertwining below the earth and their branches
intertwining above it; of their rough coating of bark and queer, gnarled
limbs; of the bushy foliage that roofed the entire forest, save where the
sunbeams found a path through which to touch the ground in little spots
and to cast weird and 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 its shade. Coming from the sunlit meadows into its mazes it
seems at first gloomy, then pleasant, and afterward filled with never-
ending delights.
For hundreds of years it has flourished in all its magnificence, the
silence of its inclosure unbroken save by the chirp of busy chipmunks, the
growl of wild beasts and the songs of birds.
Yet Burzee has its inhabitants--for all this. Nature peopled it in the
beginning with Fairies, Knooks, Ryls and Nymphs. As long as the Forest
stands it will be a home, a refuge and a playground to these sweet
immortals, who revel undisturbed in its depths.
Civilization has never yet reached Burzee. Will it ever, I wonder?
2. The Child of the Forest
Once, so long ago our great-grandfathers could scarcely have heard it
mentioned, there lived within the great Forest of Burzee a wood-nymph
named Necile. She was closely related to the mighty Queen Zurline, and
her home was beneath the shade of a widespreading oak. Once every year,
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The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus
on Budding Day, when the trees put forth their new buds, Necile held the
Golden Chalice of Ak to the lips of the Queen, who drank therefrom to the
prosperity of the Forest. S