than at
any other. You get up at midnight and toss your spare coppers to the
half-benumbed musicians whiffling beneath your windows, although at any
other time you would consider their performance a nuisance, and call
angrily for the police. Poverty, and scanty clothing, and fireless
grates, come home at this season to the bosoms of the rich, and they
give of their abundance. The very red-breast of the woods enjoys his
Christmas feast. Good feeling incarnates itself into plum-pudding. The
Master's words, "The poor ye have always with you," wear at this time a
deep significance. For at least one night on each year over all
Christendom there is brotherhood. And good men, sitting amongst their
families, or by a solitary fire like me, when they remember the light,
that shone over the poor clowns huddling on the Bethlehem plains
eighteen hundred years ago, the apparition of shining angels overhead,
the song "Peace on earth and good-will toward men," which for the first
hallowed the midnight air,--pray for that strain's fulfilment, that
battle and strife may vex the nations no more, that not only on
Christmas eve, but the whole year round, men shall be brethren owning
one Father in heaven.

- - - - -

Once again, for the purpose of taking away all solitariness of feeling,
and of connecting myself, albeit only in fancy, with the proper gladness
of the time, let me think of the comfortable family dinners now being
drawn to a close, of the good wishes uttered, and the presents made,
quite valueless in themselves, yet felt to be invaluable from the
feelings from which they spring; of the little children, by sweetmeats
lapped in Elysium; and of the pantomime, pleasantest Christmas sight of
all, with the pit a sea of grinning delight, the boxes a tier of beaming
juvenility, the galleries, piled up to the far-receding roof, a mass of
happy laughter which a clown's joke brings down in mighty avalanches. In
the pit, sober people relax themselves, and suck oranges, and quaff
ginger-pop; in the boxes, Miss, gazing through her curls, thinks the
Fairy Prince the prettiest creature she ever beheld, and Master, that to
be a clown must be the pinnacle of human happiness: while up in the
galleries the hard literal world is for an hour sponged out and
obliterated; the chimney-sweep forgets, in his delight when the
policeman comes to grief, the harsh call of his master, and Cinderella,
when the demons are foile