hospitably with everybody that came.

Half an hour afterward, Mr. Packer and Joe Banks and Joe's friend
Chauncey were down cellar together, filling some pitchers from the
best barrel of cider. The guests were tramping to and fro overhead in
the best room; there was a great noise of buzzing talk and laughter.

"Come, sir, give us a taste before we go up; it's master hot up
there," said Chauncey, who was nothing if not convivial; and the three
men drank solemnly in turn from the smallest of the four pitchers;
then Mr. Packer stooped again to replenish it.

"Whatever become o' that petition?" whispered Chauncey; but Joe Banks
gave him a warning push with his elbow. "Wish ye merry Christmas!"
said Chauncey unexpectedly to some one who called him from the
stairhead.

"Hold that light nearer," said Mr. Packer. "Come, Joe, I ain't goin'
to hear no more o' that nonsense about me beatin' off old Ferris." He
had been king of his Christmas company upstairs, but down here he was
a little ashamed.

"Land! there's the fiddle," said Chauncey. "Le' 's hurry up;" and the
three cup-bearers hastened back up the cellar-stairs to the scene of
festivity.

The two Christmas trees, the landmark pines, stood tall and strong on
the hill looking down at the shining windows of the house. There was a
sound like a summer wind in their tops; the bright moon and the stars
were lighting them, and all the land and sea, that Christmas night.

ALL MY SAD CAPTAINS.

I.

Mrs. Peter Lunn was a plump little woman who bobbed her head like a
pigeon when she walked. Her best dress was a handsome, if not new,
black silk which Captain Lunn, her lamented husband, had bought many
years before in the port of Bristol. The decline of shipping interests
had cost this worthy shipmaster not only the better part of his small
fortune, but also his health and spirits; and he had died a poor man
at last, after a long and trying illness. Such a lingering disorder,
with its hopes and despairs, rarely affords the same poor
compensations to a man that it does to a woman; the claims upon public
interest and consideration, the dignity of being assailed by any
ailment out of the common course--all these things are to a man but
the details of his general ignominy and impatience.

Captain Peter Lunn may have indulged in no sense of his own
consequence and uniqueness as an invalid; but his wife bore herself as
a woman should who was the heroine in so sad a drama, and