with one or two elisions, I give in the appropriate sentences of the writer: it is from the column usually devoted to the gossip of the colony, and therefore called Town Talk.'

66

'Christmas Eve! which being the case, and as all men say that honesty is the best policy, I think I had better make a clean breast of it at starting, and confess that I don't mean to write anything at all to-day, except Christmas talk. In the English "Prayer Book" you occasionally see the heading, "For the Epistle" instead of " The Epistle," as usual; in the same way let the reader suppose the title of this column to be For Town Talk" in place of "Town Talk." And then, when he has read thus far, he can, if he so please, skip all the rest. If, however, he is a good, genial sort of man, he won't do anything of the sort, but read it right through, by way of impressing upon his mind that it is Christmas: for unless one is a very old stager here, or has the honour of being colonial-born, it is not quite so easy to realize the presence of Christmas. The old gentleman comes amongst us here in a garb so very different from that in which you and I used to hail him in the olden time, that sometimes he does not seem like the same individual. Church folks, I suppose, would not hear of an Act of Parliament, “For the transfer of that holiday commonly called Christmas Day to the coldest part of the winter season." I don't know why they should not, though; Church authorities have done such things before now. There have been endless quarrels about the proper time of keeping Easterin fact, I am not quite sure that the Greeks and Romans have come to the settlement of the question yet. And then, you will remember, also, that it is written in history how a notice was once affixed to a Devonshire church-door, "There'll be no Sunday here next Sunday, 'cause measter's gwaun tu Dawlish to preach."* Ergo, if Sundays have

In a village which I knew well, the parson, as was common years ago, had to perform the duties at two distant churches; and to provide for this, the announcement was made by the clerk in the following

been known that were Easter Sundays in some parts and not Easter Sundays in other parts, two or three hundred miles away; and if there really could be 'no Sunday next Sunday,' why could not Christmas Day be transferred to the winter time? I am sure if Christmas had fallen a few months back, in that cold weather when the snow was on Table Mountain, we could have clustered round the fire in right earnest, punished the roast beef and plum-pudding in prime style, and done the port wine and walnuts afterwards gloriously. To-morrow I hope we shall do our best to behave like true Britons and loyal subjects of her Most Gracious Majesty. If it is not possible to eat as respectable a dinner with the thermometer at eighty as at thirty, it is possible to be jolly and good-tempered, and, what is still better, kindhearted and considerate to all about us-as, indeed, we ought to be every day.'

People with the newest, most improved, and enlightened ideas have got hold of the notion that Christmas-boxes and revelry, and all that sort of thing, are by no means sage. Your servant sells you his labour, they say, and you buy it; why should he want Christmas-boxes any more than the man who sells you so many yards of cloth or calico? Now I venture to think that the good-natured reader who has read thus far will see the weakness of this style of argument. As a very jolly friend of mine, rolling along under sixteen stone weight of rotundity, or thereabouts, but a very shrewd and a very successful man withal, used to say, 'You must grease the wheels sometimes;' and in your mind's eye don't you see that old woodcut in Esop's Fables' of the unbent bow lying on the ground?

But there is a motive for keeping Christmas which is far more beautiful and altogether excellent than greasing of wheels and unbending of bows, and that is, the godlike

terms: Notice is hereby given, that our parson will preach here and at St. Edmund's each Sunday to all eternity.' He meant to say 'alternately.'

feeling of benevolence, the genuine, earnest desire to make others happy, without the shadow of a thought of any benefit to be derived by oneself. That is the sort of feeling to keep Christmas with; and let the thermoineter stand at what degree it will, the man who is actuated by it will be sure to have a merry time of it. He won't be afflicted with abstract mental calculations about Christmasboxes; no sense of dignity and selfrespect will withhold him from joining in the merry dance and song, even though his voice be none of the sweetest, nor his movements of the most graceful. If you look at it rightly, a certain degree of abandon at Christmas-time, springing from pure benevolence, is highly respectable, and a dance, 'join hands, up the middle and down again,' a most praiseworthy occupation. And suppose you admit that it is all vanity of vanity, yet out of such vanity comes recreation in the truest etymological meaning of the word; a forgetting of past vexations and quarrels, and a girding up of oneself with the voluntary obliteration of past trials, to the fresh battle which we all have to wage, year by year, with life.

In almost all the colonies there are Church establishments; and the religious celebrations peculiar to that especially interesting season of the Church are, of course, carried out with all the zeal which characterizes the season in England.

There must be, however, a very appreciable difference in the manner physically of celebrating our greatest and pleasantest anniversary. We have seen something of these differences as they occur in Canada, Australasia, and Africa. India falls out of our subject, for it is not a colony. Ceylon, I believe, in distinction to the peninsula, is a colony, and here the colonists, principally nutmeg and coffee planters, spend their Christmas at a time of year when the fervid tropical heat is somewhat lessened by the declination of the sun to the south, though the temperature is even then of a kind to astonish the new colonists for a year or two. Ceylon has, however, the advantage of possessing an alterna

tive climate; and the mountain ranges of the interior, not being so inaccessible or so distant as the Himalayas in India, most of the planters, at least, can contrive to spend the very hottest seasons, at such an elevation as materially to alleviate the fervid tropical heat.

Of the colonies in Europe, we know, to our cost, Gibraltar and Malta, which figure for so much in the expenditure of the year. Few people, however, know anything of the little colony of Heligoland; and possibly to many the lines following will reveal, for the first time, the true etymology of the naine, and the meaning of its flag, which is tricolour:

Green is the land,

Red is the cliff,

White is the sand:

These are the colours of the Holy Land.' Well! these colonies of ours are delicious places in many respects; but though climate, and luscious fruits and large sense of freedom, and plenty to be had in return for little labour, are recommendations, yet they have their drawbacks: for myself, nothing would compensate me for the attacks of mosquitoes, cockroaches, vampires, rats, ants, and other obnoxious insects, more or less the bane of most of our tropical colonies; and as to weather, I am inclined to be of the opinion of our merry monarch, Charles II., who thought that of all countries in the world, England had the happiest climate, since in it one could be out of doors more days, and more hours of the day, than in any other country under the sun.

While, then, I am glad that those of my countrymen, who, either by choice or through the imperative calls of business or professional life, can enjoy the good old 'Christmas festivities, under every variety of climate, and under every diversity of circumstance, I must congratulate myself and my home readers on the fact that we can celebrate this great annual festival at home in Merry England. Where the salutation is

'God save you, merry gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,
For Christ our Lord in Bethlehem
Was born this happy day!'

which lay about the grass were transformed into golden fragments; the gravel paths became a mass of sparkling amber. What a lovely atmosphere enveloped everything as we peeped through those yellow panes! How cold and dull the selfsame scene appeared through ordinary glass! I have often thought of that dear old window in later years, and how pleasant it would be to look upon the world through some moral transparency equally enlivening. I think there are some of us who have this happy gift-who see life and its cares, disappointments, losses, uglinesses, all thus delicately tinted. To them, the absence of a dear friend, the arrival of a dun downstairs, the failure of a favourite scheme, the faithlessness of a mistress, the faults and imperfections of mankind at large appear en couleur de rose. Ah! lucky mortals, who can thus see all things through this sweet and mellowed light!

My uncle is an old gentleman in a dark-blue coat and brass buttons. The collar of this coat is of the ancient type, padded and rolled, and so large that it touches the back of his head. His legs are enveloped in drab-coloured cloth breeches and tightly-buttoned gaiters, terminating in a pair of highly-polished and very square-toed shoes. His cuffs, instead of contracting at the wrist, expand in that direction like a flattened muffin bell, and nearly cover his hands, only leaving to view on either side a row of shiny nails-so oval in shape that they resemble tiny plovers' eggs, split down lengthwise. A ponderous chronometer is concealed in a fob about S.S.E. of the lowest button of his waistcoat. From this depends a massive gold chain of such dimen'sions that any individual link would make an average-sized signet-ring. As my uncle inclines to corpulency, it requires some effort, and no small amount of puffing and blowing, to extricate this machine from its receptacle. That operation is usually effected by resting his elbows on the arm-chair, seizing the bunch of seals with both his hands, and gently swaying his body to and fro, until the desired end is attained,

and the watch comes out with an awful jerk. It must have had firstrate works to withstand the shock. An inferior article could never have survived such treatment. As for replacing it in its original position, after finding out the time, that was a feat which my uncle never attempted in society. My impression is that it could not have been done without assistance. I used to think that he rang for Peter to help him when we were gone; but on this point that trusty retainer, on being questioned by us, persisted in a discreet silence.

My uncle's features are tolerably good. He has a large kind eye and a capacious forehead. His nose, perhaps, partakes too much of that metallic hue which is said to be the result of an over-partiality for port wine, and his lips, especially in winter, are somewhat purple, but altogether he is rather a goodlooking old gentleman. I must not, however, forget to state, that he has no teeth-at least in present wear. Two or three sets of grinders designed by dental artists of celebrity, we know, have been made for him, and were, indeed, discovered by my brother Tom (a youth of great promise, and an inquiring mind) stowed away on the third shelf of the lefthand library cupboard, one morning when my uncle was out, but he never wore them.

Nature, ever bountiful in compensating for such defects, enabled him to digest his food without their assistance, although his manner of eating-when nose and chin came into close proximity caused us children some surprise, and induced disrespectful comparisons between our revered relative and a grotesquely carved wooden nutcracker which we used at dessert. Whether it was this peculiarity, or the general awe which we felt for him suggested the name, I cannot remember, but he was familiarly known to us under the sobriquet of Grampus. Grampus belonged to that fine old school of British worthies who entertain a profound contempt for the abilities of the rising generation. He was perpetually cross-examining us on the