Omne bene
Sine poena
Tempua est ludendi.
Venit hora
Absque mora
Libros deponendi.
OLD HOLIDAY SCHOOL-SONG.
IN the preg paper I have made some general observations on the Christmas festivities of England, and am tempted to illustrate them by some aes of a Christmas passed in the try; in perusing which I would most courteously invite my reader to lay aside the austerity of wisdom, and to put on that genuine holiday spirit which is tolerant of folly and anxious only for amusement.
In the course of a December tour in Yorkshire, I rode for a long distan one of the public coaches on the day preg Christmas. The coach was crowded, both inside and out, with passengers who, by their talk, seemed principally bound to the mansions of relations or friends to eat the Christmas dinner. It was loaded also with hampers of game and baskets and boxes of delicacies, and hares hung dangling their long ears about the ans box, presents from distant friends for the impendi. I had three ?ne rosy-cheeked school boys for my fellow-passengers inside, full of the buxom health and manly spirit which I have observed in the children of this try.
They were returning home for the holidays in high glee, and promising themselves a world of enjoyment. It was delightful to hear the gigantic plans of the little rogues, and the impracticable feats they were to perform during their six weeks emancipation from the abhorred thraldom of book, birch, and pedagogue. They were full of anticipations of the meeting with the family and household, down to the very cat and dog, and of the joy they were to give their little sisters by the presents with which their pockets were crammed; but the meeting to which they seemed to look forward with the greatest impatience was with Bantam, which I found to be a pony, and, acc to their talk, possessed of more virtues than any steed sihe days of Bucephalus. How he could trot! how he could run! and then such leaps as he would take!--there was not a hedge in the whole try that he could not clear.
They were uhe particular guardianship of the an, to whom, whenever an opportunity presehey addressed a host of questions, and pronounced him one of the best fellows in the world. Indeed, I could not but notice the more than ordinary air of bustle and importance of the an, who wore his hat a little on one side and had a large bunch of Christmas greens stu the buttonhole of his coat. He is always a personage full of mighty care and business, but he is particularly s this season, having so many issions to execute in sequence of the great interge of presents. And here, perhaps, it may not be uable to my untravelled readers to have a sketch that may serve as a general representation of this very numerous and important class of funaries, who have a dress, a manner, a language, an air peculiar to themselves and prevalent throughout the fraternity; so that wherever an English stage-an may be seen he ot be mistaken for one of any other craft or mystery.
He has only a broad, full face, curiously mottled with red, as if the blood had been forced by hard feeding into every vessel of the skin; he is swelled into jolly dimensions by frequent potations of malt liquors, and his bulk is still further increased by a multiplicity of coats, in which he is buried like a cauli?ower, the upper one reag to his heels. He wears a broad-brimmed, low-ed hat; a huge roll of colored handkerchief about his neck, know