The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus
by L. Frank Baum
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?
