said Paul to fair Polly.
"Dear Uncle, has ordered his chariot;
All's over," said Matthew to Harriet.
"And pray now be all going to bedward,"
Said kind Aunt Rebecca to Edward!

CHRISTMAS EVE, 1849,

is the time of Robert Browning's beautiful poem of "Christmas Eve and
Easter Day," in which the poet sings the song of man's immortality,
proclaiming, as Easter Day breaks and Christ rises, that

"Mercy every way is infinite."

[Illustration]

And, in his beautiful poem of "In Memoriam," Lord Tennyson
associates some of his finest verses with the ringing of

THE CHRISTMAS BELLS.

"Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

* * * * *

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be."

[Illustration]

[Illustration: THE CHRISTMAS BELLS.]

As the poet Longfellow stood on the lofty tower of Bruges
Cathedral the belfry chimes set him musing, and of those
chimes he says:

"Then most musical and solemn, bringing back the olden times,
With their strange, unearthly changes, rang the melancholy chimes,
Like the psalms from some old cloister, when the nuns sing in the
choir;
And the great bell tolled among them, like the chanting of a friar.
Visions of the days departed, shadowy phantoms filled my brain:
They who live in history only seemed to walk the earth again."

CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR CARDS

were first circulated in England in 1846. That year not more than a
thousand copies were printed, and that was considered a large sale.
The numbers distributed annually soon increased to tens and hundreds
of thousands, and now there are millions of them. Mr. J. C. Horsley,
a member of the Royal Academy, designed this first card which
was sent out in 1846. It represents a family party of three
generations--grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, and
little children--and all are supposed to be joining in the sentiment,
"A Merry Christmas