t of all the conspirators, and herself
the greatest conspirator of all. Blessed is the season which engages the
whole world in a conspiracy of love!

After dinner, eaten, let it be confessed, with more haste and less
accompaniment of talk than usual, the parlor doors were opened, and
there stood the Christmas tree in a glow of light, its wonderful
branches laden with all manner of strange fruits not to be found in the
botanies. The wild shouts, the merry laughter, the cries of delight as
one coveted fruit after another dropped into long-expectant arms still
linger in my ears now that the little tapers are burnt out, the boughs
left bare, and the actors in the perennial drama are fast asleep, with
new and strange bedfellows selected from the spoils of the night.
Cradled between a delightful memory and a blissful anticipation, who
does not envy them?

After this charming prelude is over, Rosalind comes into the study, and
studies for the fortieth time the effect of the new design of decoration
which she had this year worked out, and which gives these rather somber
rows of books a homelike and festive aspect. It pleases me to note the
spray of holly that obscures the title of Bacon's solemn and weighty
"Essays," and I get half a page of suggestions for my notebook from the
fact that a sprig of mistletoe has fallen on old Burton's "Anatomy of
Melancholy." Rosalind has reason to be satisfied, and if I read her face
aright she has succeeded even in her own eyes in bringing Christmas,
with its fragrant memories and its heavenly visions, into the study. I
cannot help thinking, as I watch her piling up the fire for a blaze of
unusual splendor, that if more studies had their Rosalinds to bring in
the genial currents of life there would be more cheer and hope and
large-hearted wisdom in the books which the world is reading to-day.

When the fire has reached a degree of intensity and magnitude which
Rosalind thinks adequate to the occasion, I take down a well-worn volume
which opens of itself at a well-worn page. It is a book which I have
read and re-read many times, and always with a kindling sympathy and
affection for the man who wrote it; in whatever mood I take it up there
is something in it which touches me with a sense of kinship. It is not a
great book, but it is a book of the heart, and books of the heart have
passed beyond the outer court of criticism before we bestow upon them
that phrase of supreme regard. There are ot