t a side table, returning to my seat opposite
him as soon as my duty was ended. On Christmas Day we all had our
glasses filled, and then my father, raising his, would say: "Here's to us
all. God bless us!" a toast which was rapidly and willingly drunk. His
conversation, as may be imagined, was often extremely humorous, and I
have seen the servants, who were waiting at table, convulsed often with
laughter at his droll remarks and stories. Now, as I recall these
gatherings, my sight grows blurred with the tears that rise to my eyes.
But I love to remember them, and to see, if only in memory, my father at
his own table, surrounded by his own family and friends--a beautiful
Christmas spirit.

"It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas,
when its Mighty Founder was a child himself," was his own advice, and
advice which he followed both in letter and spirit.

One morning--it was the last day of the year, I remember--while we were
at breakfast at "Gad's Hill," my father suggested that we should
celebrate the evening by a charade to be acted in pantomime. The
suggestion was received with acclamation, and amid shouts and laughing we
were then and there, guests and members of the family, allotted our
respective parts. My father went about collecting "stage properties,"
rehearsals were "called" at least four times during the morning, and in
all our excitement no thought was given to that necessary part of a
charade, the audience, whose business it is to guess the pantomime. At
luncheon someone asked suddenly: "But what about an audience?" "Why,
bless my soul," said my father, "I'd forgotten all about that."
Invitations were quickly dispatched to our neighbours, and additional
preparations made for supper. In due time the audience came, and the
charade was acted so successfully that the evening stands out in my
memory as one of the merriest and happiest of the many merry and happy
evenings in our dear old home. My father was so extremely funny in his
part that the rest of us found it almost impossible to maintain
sufficient control over ourselves to enable the charade to proceed as it
was planned to do. It wound up with a country dance, which had been
invented that morning and practised quite a dozen times through the day,
and which was concluded at just a few moments before midnight. Then
leading us all, characters and audience, out into the wide hall, and
throwing wide open the door, my f