"Nicholas, Nicholas."

He is reproving.

"Nicholas, you must have known this had to happen. For all these years, every Mass of Christ, you have gone out to the children of Myra and all around, giving your gifts, making of yourself an apparition in your red robes and hood, your beard and twinkling eyes all that was visible of your everyday self, working your magic of love.

"You must have realized that you were mortal, that a day would come when you would take sick at this season."

What he says is just and logical. He, one of my two companions of the elven kind. They have never said, "We are elves." Yet what else could they be, tall, grave, always hooded, clad in silvern grey, aging, yet not as men do, but more slowly and deliberately? And there is also their uncanny skill in shooting, with their bows of strange device.

But whatever they be, elves or men, they have been my companions. They have aided me in making the toys for the children, they have gone with me to the huts in the lands around Myra, they have been my helpmates as I have tried to bring what should be the spirit of this season, the old season transformed by love, to all the innocent young.

He is right. Age has come for me, as it must for all, and here, past my fiftieth year, I lie ill on the eve of the Mass of Christ, and the children will receive no tokens of love this year.

"Nicholas!" I wake from my fever. It has become Christ's morn. No work is being done. There is only silence across the fields, and the frost settles quietly on the stubble of the year.

"Nicholas, something has happened. Paul, the innkeeper, has done something extraordinary. He dressed in robes not unlike yours, and took toys you gave in the past to his own children, now grown. He went out into Myra, and gave them to the other inhabitants' younger children. And this is the thing. The little children believed.

"Yes, Nicholas. They should have known it was not you. They must have known it was not you. Yet simply and innocently they did not. They beamed and climbed into his lap just as though it were yours, and they took the toys, and they began their new year in this uncertain world with smiles just as though you were there."

"Nicholas. Yes, we know you are sick again. Your years are heavy upon you. But it's all right.

"Yes, Nicholas, I understand. You feel lost without the duties you used to assume on the Eve of Christ's Mass. Yet you must accept that you have become older, and there is no going back.

"But you remember last year, Paul's impersonation of you? It has happened again. And now it isn't just Paul. In the countryside, in the villages, there must be a dozen 'Nicholas'es. They are not all stout. They are not all even old. But they all are inhabited with your spirit.

"The little children. It is they who really do it. The adults yearn to respond to their innocent love, and these children believe almost any artifice the adults then resort to. So long as it is done in your spirit, the children smile, and cannot be persuaded that it may be their very own parent who bounces them upon their knee.

"Yes, Nicholas, their parent. In the little hamlet where the charcoal burners work, even a woman put on the red robes, with padding to conceal her breasts, and fashioned for herself a beard of fur, and she was transformed in the small childrens' minds into your image.

"Nicholas, there is something happening here for which we cannot account."

"Nicholas!

"Nicholas, can you hear me?

"Nicholas, listen.

"Last year, I said that a dozen or more had taken your place.

"This year, there are ... I cannot put a number to it, Nicholas. A hundred? A thousand? It is all across the land. Wherever people feel the need, and that is everywhere, for a Nicholas to be the magic giver of gifts, of love, someone stands up, someone puts on Nicholas' robe and Nicholas' hat, and there you are.

"We came to you from afar off, those years ago, to help, to try to understand, because you seemed unique. In this age of barbarism reborn, you in your mission of love were creating a lone island of peace and joy. We wanted to understand, because we ourselves, however composed you may have taken us to be, are struggling with the barbaric in our own beings and seek your insights as we strive to win through to the better people we believe we can become.

"But now you are unique no more. No, Nicholas, I wish least of all to be cruel. You are as much a treasure as ever. But now others have taken up your flame. And there are so very many.

"And us? I think we have found what we sought, what may save us from the conflict in our natures. In these years of companionship, of sharing with you the spirit of this season, we have learned that, in the gap between the primitive demands we are born with and the serenity of logical thought we aspire to, there can be built a bridge on which they can be reconciled and at peace, a bridge of ... friendship. We will learn to be friends of our own selves. And among our kind, and when we meet strangers, we will offer, even when logic fails to offer sufficient reason, our open hand, in hope of making new friends.

"We are ... grateful.

"Nicholas! Can you hear me? It is hard to tell. You lie so quietly. Your eyes seem to be growing dim. Listen. There will be millions. Millions, do you understand, Nicholas? Down the years to come, across the reaches around us, under the sun and under the stars, people will ask in all their tongues, 'Is there really a Nicholas of the Mass of Christ?' And their youngest will wait breathless for the answer. And then someone will put on, perhaps, no more than a replica of your red and fur-trimmed hat, and will say, 'There is now.' And it will be so."

And then -- and despite my sickness and the darkness that seems to be thickening, I can well make this out -- he throws back his hood for the first time in my presence in all the years of our companionship, and yes, there are the features the stories say are found on the head of an elf. He makes an odd gesture with his hand, and he says something strange, something very strange indeed to say to a man who is, and there can be no doubt about this, dying.

He says, "Nicholas, bishop of Myra, perhaps saint to be: live long and prosper."