The Christmas Holidays
FINE old Christmas with the snowy hair and ruddy face had done his duty that year in the fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and colour with all the heightening trast of frost and snow. Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the limbs of infancy; it lay with the liest finished border on every sloping roof, making the dark-red gables stand out with a new depth of colour; it weighed heavily on the laurels and fir-trees till it fell from them with a shuddering sound; it clothed the rough turnip-field with whiteness and made the sheep look like dark blotches; the gates were all blocked up with the sloping drifts, and here and there a disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified `in unrecumbent sadness; there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens too were oill pale cloud - no sound or motion in anything but the dark river, that flowed and moaned like an uing sorrow. But old Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell o-door world, for he meant to light up home with new brightness, to deepen all the riess of indoor colour, and give a keener edge of delight to the warm fragrance of food: he meant to prepare a sweet imprisohat would strehe primitive fellowship of kindred, and make the sunshine of familiar human faces as wele as the hidden day-star. His kindness fell but hardly on the homeless - fell but hardly on the homes where the hearth was not very warm, and where the food had little fragrance; where the human faces had no sunshine in them, but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of uant want. But the fine old seaso well; and if he has not learnt the secret how to bless men impartially, it is because his father Time, with ever uing purpose, still hides that secret in his own mighty, slow-beati.
Ahis Christmas day, in spite of Toms fresh delight in home, was not, he thought, somehow or other, quite so happy as it had always been before. The red berries were just as abundant on the holly, and he and Maggie had dressed all the windows and mantelpieces and picture-frames on Christmas Eve with as much taste as ever, wedding the thick-set scarlet clusters with branches of the black-berried ivy. There had been singing uhe windows after midnight - supernatural singing, Maggie always felt, in spite of Toms ptuous insistehat the singers were old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the church choir: she trembled with awe when their caroling broke in upon her dreams, and the image of men in fustian clothes was always thrust away by the vision of angels resting on the parted cloud. But the midnight t had helped as usual to lift the m above the level of on days; and then, there was the smell of hot toast and ale from the kit, at the breakfast hour; the favourite ahe green boughs and the short sermon, gave the appropriate festal character to the church-going; and aunt and uncle Moss, with all their seven children, were looking like so many reflectors of the bright parlour fire, when the church-goers came back stamping the snow from their feet; the plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as ever, and came in with the symbolic blue flames around it, as if it had been heroically snatched from the her fires into which it had been thrown by dyspeptic puritans; the dessert lendid as ever with its golden es, brown nuts, and the crystalline light and dark of apple jelly and damson cheese: in all these things Christmas was as it had always been siom could