th us;
what it may be with you I don't know,--the 12th of June next year,
perhaps; and if it should be the consecrated season with you, I don't
see how you can keep it. You have no turkeys; you would not desecrate
the festival by offering up a withered Chinese bantam, instead of the
savoury grand Norfolcian holocaust, that smokes all around my nostrils
at this moment from a thousand firesides. Then what puddings have you?
Where will you get holly to stick in your churches, or churches to stick
your dried tea-leaves (that must be the substitute) in? What memorials
you can have of the holy time, I see not. A chopped missionary or two
may keep up the thin idea of Lent and the wilderness; but what standing
evidence have you of the Nativity? 'Tis our rosy-cheeked, homestalled
divines, whose faces shine to the tune of _unto us a child was
born_,--faces fragrant with the mince-pies of half a century, that alone
can authenticate the cheerful mystery. I feel, I feel my bowels
refreshed with the holy tide; my zeal is great against the unedified
heathen. Down with the Pagodas; down with the idols,--Ching-chong-fo and
his foolish priesthood! Come out of Babylon, oh my friend, for her time
is come, and the child that is native, and the Proselyte of her gates,
shall kindle and smoke together! And in sober sense what makes you so
long from among us, Manning? You must not expect to see the same England
again which you left.

Empires have been overturned, crowns trodden into dust, the face of the
Western world quite changed; your friends have all got old, those you
left blooming, myself (who am one of the few that remember you)--those
golden hairs which you recollect my taking a pride in, turned to silvery
and gray. Mary has been dead and buried many years; she desired to be
buried in the silk gown you sent her. Rickman, that you remember active
and strong, now walks out supported by a servant-maid and a stick.
Martin Burney is a very old man. The other day an aged woman knocked at
my door and pretended to my acquaintance. It was long before I had the
most distant cognition of her; but at last together we made her out to
be Louisa, the daughter of Mrs. Topham, formerly Mrs. Morton, who had
been Mrs. Reynolds, formerly Mrs. Kenney, whose first husband was
Holcroft, the dramatic writer of the last century. St. Paul's church is
a heap of ruins; the Monument isn't half so high as you knew it, divers
parts being successively taken down which