A CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 266, 19 April 1875, Page 3

A CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE.

(From the Banbury News.) Peter Lamb of our village is not going to have Santa Claus for his children this Christmas. Last Christmas he undertook to represent the character himself, and after dressing himself in a fur cap and a buffalo robe, and loading himself "with toys, he went up to the roof of the house and climbed into the chimney, to which he had fixed a rope which hung down the flue. By some means he managed to get into the wrong flue, and instead of coming down into the room where his wife and children were waiting for him, he tumbled clear to the kitchen and rolled out on the floor with a yell. The hired girl was sitting there, communing with her lover—a red-haired man named M'Ginnis. When Mr Lamb arrived she screamed and fainted, but Mr M'Ginnis was not at all soared; and as he supposed that the intruder was a burglar, he attacked Mr Lamb with the poker, emptied the coal scuttle on him, kicked him through the door, and then handed him over to a passing policeman, who took him to the station, where he would have.been locked up all night if the magistrate hadn't recognised him. When he got home his wife and children were sure he had been suffocated in the flue, and Mrs Lamb was in awful distress because she didn't know whether she ought to have the side of the house taken out that night, or to go out and hunt up a mourning bonnet to wear to church next day. The energetic M'Ginnis had gone home to gladden his family with Mr Lamb's bundle of toys, and the servant girl had given notice that she would leave at daylight. So this year Mr Lamb has told his little ones that the fiction about Santa Claus is a wicked and degrading superstition, and he is going to hang their presents on a tree.