“ ’E ’ad to eat rats!” Mrs. Mullet had told me, wide-eyed in the kitchen. “Rats, fancy! They ’ad to fry ’em!”

With everyone in the household disqualified for one reason or another as the Bringer of Gifts, that left only Father Christmas.

He would be coming again in less than a week and, in order to settle the question for once and for all, I had long ago laid plans to trap him.

Scientifically.

Birdlime, as any practical chemist will tell you, can be easily manufactured by boiling the middle bark of holly for eight or nine hours, burying it under a stone for a fortnight, and then, when it is disinterred, washing and pulverizing it in running river water and leaving it to ferment. The stuff had been used for centuries by bird-sellers, who had smeared it on branches to trap the songbirds they sold in the city streets.

The great Sir Francis Galton had described a method of manufacturing the stuff in his book The Art of Travel; or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries, a signed copy of which I had found among a heavily underlined set of his works in Uncle Tar’s library. I had followed Sir Francis’s instructions to the letter, lugging home in midsummer armloads of holly from the great oaks that grew in Gibbet Wood, and boiling the broken branches over a laboratory Bunsen burner in a stew pot borrowed—without her knowledge—from Mrs. Mullet. During the final stages, I had added a few chemical twists of my own to make the pulverized resin a hundred times more sticky than the original recipe. Now, after six months of preparation, my concoction was powerful enough to stop a Gabon gorilla in its tracks, and Father Christmas—if he existed—wouldn’t stand a chance. Unless the jolly old gentleman just happened to be traveling with a handy bottle of sulfuric ether, (C₂H₅)2O, to dissolve the birdlime, he was going to stay stuck to our chimney pot forever—or until I decided to set him free.