ee what a
jeweller he is! How he has silvered over the dark-green reticulations
with his frosts! The faggot which the Tramp gathers for his fire is
thicklier incrusted with gems than ever was sceptre of the Moguls. Go
into the woods, and behold on the black boughs his glories of pearl and
diamond--pendant splendours that, smitten by the noon-ray, melt into
tears and fall but to congeal into splendours again. Nor does he work in
black and white alone. He has on his palette more gorgeous colours than
those in which swim the summer setting suns; and with these, about three
o'clock, he begins to adorn his west, sticking his red hot ball of a sun
in the very midst; and a couple of hours later, when the orb has fallen,
and the flaming crimson has mellowed into liquid orange, you can see the
black skeletons of trees scribbled upon the melancholy glory. Nor need I
speak of the magnificence of a winter midnight, when space, sombre blue,
crowded with star and planet, "burnished by the frost," is glittering
like the harness of an archangel full panoplied against a battle day.

For years and years now I have watched the seasons come and go around
Dreamthorp, and each in its turn interests me as if I saw it for the
first time. But the other week it seems that I saw the grain ripen; then
by day a motley crew of reapers were in the fields, and at night a big
red moon looked down upon the stocks of oats and barley; then in mighty
wains the plenteous harvest came swaying home, leaving a largess on the
roads for every bird; then the round, yellow, comfortable-looking stacks
stood around the farm-houses, hiding them to the chimneys; then the woods
reddened, the beech hedges became russet, and every puff of wind made
rustle the withered leaves; then the sunset came before the early dark,
and in the east lay banks of bleak pink vapour, which are ever a prophecy
of cold; then out of a low dingy heaven came all day, thick and silent,
the whirling snow,--and so by exquisite succession of sight and sound
have I been taken from the top of the year to the bottom of it, from
midsummer, with its unreaped harvests, to the night on which I am sitting
here--Christmas, 1862.

Sitting here, I incontinently find myself holding a levee of departed
Christmas nights. Silently, and without special call, into my study of
imagination come these apparitions, clad in snowy mantles, brooched and
gemmed with frosts. Their numbers I do not care to count, f