hey are butterflies. Shut
them up in a cage, and they will dash their delicate wings to pieces
against its bars. Endeavor to direct them as they soar, and you cramp
their flight, you deprive them of their audacity,--two qualities which
are often to be met with in inexperience, and the loss of which--am I
wrong in saying so?--is not always compensated by maturity of talent.

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER.

III.

LITTLE FOXES.--PART II.

It was that Christmas-day that did it; I'm quite convinced of that; and
the way it was is what I am going to tell you.

You see, among the various family customs of us Crowfields, the
observance of all sorts of _fetes_ and festivals has always been a
matter of prime regard; and among all the festivals of the round ripe
year, none is so joyous and honored among us as Christmas.

Let no one upon this, prick up the ears of Archaeology, and tell us that
by the latest calculations of chronologists our ivy-grown and
holly-mantled Christmas is all a hum,--that it has been demonstrated, by
all sorts of signs and tables, that the august event it celebrates did
not take place on the 25th of December. Supposing it be so, what have we
to do with that? If so awful, so joyous an event ever took place on our
earth, it is surely worth commemoration. It is the _event_ we celebrate,
not the _time_. And if all Christians for eighteen hundred years, while
warring and wrangling on a thousand other points, have agreed to give
this one 25th of December to peace and good-will, who is he that shall
gainsay them, and for an historic scruple turn his back on the friendly
greetings of all Christendom? Such a man is capable of rewriting
Milton's Christmas Hymn in the style of Sternhold and Hopkins.

In our house, however, Christmas has always been a high day, a day whose
expectation has held waking all the little eyes in our bird's nest, when
as yet there were only little ones there, each sleeping with one eye
open, hoping to be the happy first to wish the merry Christmas and grasp
the wonderful stocking.

This year our whole family train of married girls and boys, with the
various toddling tribes thereto belonging, held high festival around a
wonderful Christmas-tree, the getting-up and adorning of which had kept
my wife and Jennie and myself busy for a week beforehand. If the little
folks think these trees grow up in a night, without labor, they know as
little about them as they do about most of the other ble