ens of Christmas greens jostle one another with good-natured
banter,--nobody is ever cross down here in the holiday season,--it is
good to take a stroll through the Farm, if one has a spot in his heart
faithful yet to the hills and the woods in spite of the latter-day
city. But it is when the moonlight is upon the water and upon the dark
phantom forest, when the heavy breathing of some passing steamer is
the only sound that breaks the stillness of the night, and the
watchman smokes his only pipe on the bulwark, that the Farm has a mood
and an atmosphere all its own, full of poetry which some day a
painter's brush will catch and hold.

Into the ugliest tenement street Christmas brings something of
picturesqueness, of cheer. Its message was ever to the poor and the
heavy-laden, and by them it is understood with an instinctive yearning
to do it honor. In the stiff dignity of the brownstone streets up-town
there may be scarce a hint of it. In the homes of the poor it blossoms
on stoop and fire-escape, looks out of the front window, and makes the
unsightly barber-pole to sprout overnight like an Aaron's-rod. Poor
indeed is the home that has not its sign of peace over the hearth, be
it but a single sprig of green. A little color creeps with it even
into rabbinical Hester Street, and shows in the shop-windows and in
the children's faces. The very feather dusters in the pedler's stock
take on brighter hues for the occasion, and the big knives in the
cutler's shop gleam with a lively anticipation of the impending goose
"with fixin's"--a concession, perhaps, to the commercial rather than
the religious holiday: business comes then, if ever. A crowd of
ragamuffins camp out at a window where Santa Claus and his wife stand
in state, embodiment of the domestic ideal that has not yet gone out
of fashion in these tenements, gazing hungrily at the announcement
that "A silver present will be given to every purchaser by a real
Santa Claus.--M. Levitsky." Across the way, in a hole in the wall, two
cobblers are pegging away under an oozy lamp that makes a yellow
splurge on the inky blackness about them, revealing to the passer-by
their bearded faces, but nothing of the environment save a single
sprig of holly suspended from the lamp. From what forgotten brake it
came with a message of cheer, a thought of wife and children across
the sea waiting their summons, God knows. The shop is their house and
home. It was once the hall of the tenement;