ll through the rest of the year, with red faces among the
abundant dark-green boughs--faces prepared for a longer service than
usual by an odorous breakfast of toast and ale. Those green boughs,
the hymn and anthem never heard but at Christmas--even the Athanasian
Creed, which was discriminated from the others only as being longer and
of exceptional virtue, since it was only read on rare
occasions--brought a vague exulting sense, for which the grown men
could as little have found words as the children, that something great
and mysterious had been done for them in heaven above and in earth
below, which they were appropriating by their presence. And then the
red faces made their way through the black biting frost to their own
homes, feeling themselves free for the rest of the day to eat, drink,
and be merry, and using that Christian freedom without diffidence.

At Squire Cass's family party that day nobody mentioned Dunstan--nobody
was sorry for his absence, or feared it would be too long. The doctor
and his wife, uncle and aunt Kimble, were there, and the annual
Christmas talk was carried through without any omissions, rising to the
climax of Mr. Kimble's experience when he walked the London hospitals
thirty years back, together with striking professional anecdotes then
gathered. Whereupon cards followed, with aunt Kimble's annual failure
to follow suit, and uncle Kimble's irascibility concerning the odd
trick which was rarely explicable to him, when it was not on his side,
without a general visitation of tricks to see that they were formed on
sound principles: the whole being accompanied by a strong steaming
odour of spirits-and-water.

But the party on Christmas-day, being a strictly family party, was not
the pre-eminently brilliant celebration of the season at the Red House.
It was the great dance on New Year's Eve that made the glory of Squire
Cass's hospitality, as of his forefathers', time out of mind. This was
the occasion when all the society of Raveloe and Tarley, whether old
acquaintances separated by long rutty distances, or cooled
acquaintances separated by misunderstandings concerning runaway calves,
or acquaintances founded on intermittent condescension, counted on
meeting and on comporting themselves with mutual appropriateness. This
was the occasion on which fair dames who came on pillions sent their
bandboxes before them, supplied with more than their evening costume;
for the feast was not to end w