naughty children.

The carp served on Christmas eve in every Berlin family, after the
distribution of gifts, and which were never absent from my mother's
table, I have always had on my own in Jena, Leipsic, and Munich, or
wherever the evening of December 24th might find us. On the whole, we
remain faithful to the Christmas customs of my own home, which vary
little from those of the Germans in Riga, where my wife's family belong;
nay, it is so hard for me to relinquish such childish habits, that, when
unable to procure a Christmas tree for the two "Eves" I spent on the
Nile, I decked a young palm and fastened candles on it. My mother's
permission that Knecht Ruprecht should visit us was contrary to her
principle never to allow us to be frightened by images of horror. Nay, if
she heard that the servants threatened us with the Black Man and other
hobgoblins of Berlin nursery tales, she was always very angry. The
arguments by which my wife induced me to banish the Christmas Man and
Knecht Ruprecht seem still more cogent, now that I think I understand the
hearts of children. It is certainly far more beautiful and just as
easy-if we desire to utilize Christmas gifts for educational purposes--to
stimulate children to goodness by telling them of the pleasure it will
give the little Christ Child, rather than by filling them with dread of
Knecht Ruprecht.

True, my mother did not fail to endeavor to inspire us with love for the
Christ Child and the Saviour, and to draw us near to him. She saw in him,
above all else, the embodiment of love, and loved him because her loving
heart understood his. In after years my own investigation and thought
brought me to the same conviction which she had reached through the
relation of her feminine nature to the person and teachings of her
Saviour. I perceived that the world as Jesus Christ found it owes him
nothing grander, more beautiful, loftier, or more pregnant with
importance than that he widened the circle of love which embraced only
the individual, the family, the city, or, at the utmost, the country of
which a person was a citizen, till it included all mankind, and this
human love, of which my mother's life gave us practical proof, is the
banner under which all the genuine progress of mankind in later years has
been made.

Nineteen centuries have passed since the one that gave us Him who died on
the cross, and how far we are still from a perfect realization of this
noblest of all the