stood
there resplendent with presents from old Santa Claus--Noah's arks,
mimic landscapes, dolls, sleds, colored cornucopias bursting with
bonbons, and especially those books of fairy-tales from whose rich
creamy pages exhaled a most divine and musty fragrance. Ah, the memory
of our childhood's hours! what is it but that enchanted lake of the
Arabian tale, from whose quiet depths we are ever and anon drawing up
in our nets some magic colored fish? Well, I reached the church. The
children, dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, were sitting
in the high-backed pews in solemn silence, while a reverend gentleman
was delivering a solemn exhortation to gratitude and goodness. Another
followed. "Very well, gentlemen," thought I, "but now please to retire
and give up the field to these children." But no. The superintendent of
the Sunday-school now advanced: the children marched up one by one, as
their names were called, and received their presents from him. Some of
them came very near grinning (poor things!), but in general they looked
as if they were going to their execution. When all was done _the
meeting was dismissed_!

Sauntering through the streets of this village, and making note of the
quaint idiosyncrasies and irregularities of character and manner
displayed by its humbler folk, I thought of the sentiment which Thoreau
so exquisitely expresses in his _Week_: "The forms of beauty fall
naturally around him who is in the performance of his proper work, as
the curled shavings drop from the plane and borings cluster round the
auger." Picturesqueness characterizes the New England white laborer, as
it does the Southern black laborer: especially is this true of those
who have emigrated from Europe when of adult age, and have been unable
to lay aside the picturesque features of their Old-World life.

One winter evening I discovered, a few miles from the village, one of
this class: he was, on the whole, the strangest human being whom it has
ever been my fortune to meet. About dusk I found myself some distance
away from the village, near the great bridge that spans the river where
it debouches into the sea. The water was heaving in long, slow swells.
A deep silence had fallen over the earth. The evening red was reflected
in the sea in rich blood dye, while the colored lights of the bridge
and the lighthouse glowed and burned in the deep, here writhing along
the waves like long golden and crimson sea-serpents, and there