of geese, which
are now peacefully feeding over the long, cold wolds of Norfolk, or are
driven gabbling and hissing by the gozzard to their pasture--how many of
those very geese were called into being simply for Christmas Day! In the
towns, with close streets and fetid courts, where the flaring gas at the
corner of an alley marks the only bright spot, a gin-palace, there a
goose-club is held; and there, for a short time, is the resting-place,
side by side with a bottle of gin, of one of those wise-looking and
self-concentrated gobblers, whose name men have generally, and, as we
think, unjustly, applied to the silly one amongst themselves.

But it is only the profusion of good things, of cakes, puddings, spices,
oranges, and fruits, from sunny Italy and Spain, from India and from
Asia, from America, North and South, and even from distant Australia; it
is not that amongst us, as long ago with the _Franklin_ in Chaucer, that
at this time--

"It snowes in our house
Of meate and drinke;"

it is not that we have huge loads of beef chines, ribs, sirloins, legs,
necks, breasts, and shoulders of mutton, fillets of veal, whole hogs,
and pigs in various stages, from the tender suckling to the
stiff-jointed father of a family, whose "back hair" makes good
clothes-brushes, and whose head is brought in at college feasts; it is
not that the air gives up its choicest fowl, and the waters yield their
best fish: plentiful as these are with us, they are nothing in profusion
to the kindly greeting and good wishes that fly about in the cold
weather, and that circulate from land's end to land's end. The whole
coast of England is surrounded by a general "shake hands." The
coast-guard on their wintry walks do not greet each other more surely
than old friends all over England do: one clasps another, and another a
third, till from Dover to London and so on to York, from Yarmouth on the
east to Bristol on the west, from John O'Groat's house at the extreme
north to the Land's End, the very toe-nail of England on the south--a
kindly greeting, we may be sure, will pass. And a cheerful thing it is,
on this day of universal equality, on this day which--

"To the cottage and the crown,
Brought tidings of salvation down,"

to think that we can touch and hold each other with friendly hands all
over our land. We all of us shake hands on Christmas Day. Leigh Hunt had
a quaint fancy that he had, as it were, by lineal descent, shaken ha