mas Day came, and we were up by daylight, for
Cousin Emily Elizabeth is, as I have told you, a High Church woman and
an Episcopalian. We haven't got any meeting-house of that denomination
in our neighborhood, and I don't exactly know what high and low church
means, without it is that one set hold to meeting-houses with a belfry,
and the others stand up for a high steeple--a thing that I told Cousin
E. E. we common people didn't aspire to; at which she laughed again, as
if I had said something awfully witty.

Well, in another report I have given you an account of this daybreak
meeting in the High Church, but just now I am taken up with the
Christmas dinner.

Now don't calculate, because we eat dinner punctually at noon in
Vermont, that people here do the same thing, because it is nothing of
the sort. Poor working people do that in this city, and nobody else. The
more genteel and the richer you are, the later you eat your meals. Most
of the well-to-do merchants eat dinner at six. Men that have got above
earning their own living dine later yet, and some have got so
disgustingly genteel and rich, that I don't suppose they dine till next
day.

Cousin Dempster attends to business yet, so he settled down on eight
o'clock for his dinner, and a splendid affair it was.

When Cousin E. E. and I came rustling downstairs with a cataract of silk
rolling after us, I just screamed right out. The sight of that table was
so exhilarating, glass a-shining--silver dishes and things
a-sparkling--flowers heaped up in flower-pots and twisted in wreaths
around the glass globe overhead, which flashed, and sparkled, and
glittered as if it had been frozen up with ten thousand icicles that
flung back all the light without melting a drop. The silk curtains were
all let down. The carpet looked like a flower-bed, and the whole room
was a sight to behold.

Cousin E. E. shut the glass doors that looked as if a sharp frost had
crept over 'em, and we sat down on the round sofa in the front room,
ready for company, with nothing but those two marble folks to hear what
we said.

But peace and quietness will never come to a house that has a fast child
like Miss Dempster, as the creature calls herself, in it. We had hardly
sat down and got our trains spread, when in she came, all in a fluff of
white muslin, and a flutteration of red ribbons, with her hair a flowing
down her back, crinkle, crinkle, and her--well--limbs just strained into
silk stockings