omen's
dresses whirled round in dance, a click as of glasses pledged by
friends. Before one of these apparitions is a mound, as of a new-made
grave, on which the snow is lying. I know, I know! Drape thyself not in
white like the others, but in mourning stole of crape; and instead of
dance music, let there haunt around thee the service for the dead! I
know that sprig of mistletoe, O Spirit in the midst! Under it I swung
the girl I loved--girl no more now than I am a boy--and kissed her spite
of blush and pretty shriek. And thee, too, with fragrant trencher in
hand, over which blue tongues of flame are playing, I do know--most
ancient apparition of them all. I remember thy reigning night. Back to
very days of childhood am I taken by the ghostly raisins simmering in a
ghostly brandy flame. Where now the merry boys and girls that thrust
their fingers in thy blaze? And now, when I think of it, thee also would
I drape in black raiment, around thee also would I make the burial
service murmur.

- - - - -

This, then, is Christmas, 1862. Everything is silent in Dreamthorp. The
smith's hammer reposes beside the anvil. The weaver's flying shuttle is
at rest. Through the clear wintry sunshine the bells this morning rang
from the gray church tower amid the leafless elms, and up the walk the
villagers trooped in their best dresses and their best faces--the latter
a little reddened by the sharp wind: mere redness in the middle aged; in
the maids, wonderful bloom to the eyes of their lovers--and took their
places decently in the ancient pews. The clerk read the beautiful
prayers of our Church, which seem more beautiful at Christmas than at
any other period. For that very feeling which breaks down at this time
the barriers which custom, birth, or wealth have erected between man and
man, strikes down the barrier of time which intervenes between the
worshipper of to-day and the great body of worshippers who are at rest
in their graves. On such a day as this, hearing these prayers, we feel a
kinship with the devout generations who heard them long ago. The devout
lips of the Christian dead murmured the responses which we now murmur;
along this road of prayer did their thoughts of our innumerable dead,
our brothers and sisters in faith and hope, approach the Maker, even as
ours at present approach Him. Prayers over, the clergyman--who is no
Boanerges, of Chrysostom, golden-mouthed, but a loving, genial-hearted