Comic Geekspeak Presents The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum.

Part 1, Youth.

Chapter 1, Burzzie.

Have you heard of the great forest of Burzzi?

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 Bursey 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 enclosure

unbroken, save by the chirp of busy chipmunks, the growl of wild beasts, and the songs of birds.

Yet Bursey has its inhabitants for all this. Nature peopled it in the beginning with fairies, nooks, riles, 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 Burzzi.

Will it ever, I wonder?

Chapter 2nd, 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 Nesil.

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