eeble, he has shrunk to his cold
bed in the west, and the victor-mist creeps, crawls, and soaks on
unopposed.

"Good-night!" cry I, suddenly. "I am going!" and I am as good as my
word.

With the triple agility of health, youth, and indignation, I scurry away
through the melancholy grass, and the heaped and fallen leaves, home.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Ding-dong bell! ding-dong bell! The Christmas bells are ringing.
Christmas has come--Christmas as it appears on a Christmas card, white
and hard, and beset with puffed-out, ruffled robins. Only Nature is wise
enough not to express the ironical wish that we may have a "merry one."

For myself, I have but small opinion of Christmas as a time of jollity.
Solemn--_blessed_, if you will--but no, not jovial. At no time do the
dead so clamor to be remembered. Even those that went a long time ago,
the regret for whose departure has settled down to a tender, almost
pleasant pain; whom at other times we go nigh to forget; even they cry
out loud, "Think of us!"

When all the family is gathered, when the fire burns quick and clear,
and the church-bells ring out grave and sweet, neither will _they_ be
left out. But, on the other hand, to one who has paid his bills, and in
whose family Death's cannon have as yet made no breaches, I do not see
why it may not be a season of moderate, placid content.

Festivity! jollity! _never!_ I have paid my bills, and there are no gaps
among my people. Sometimes I tremble when I think how many we are; one
of us must go soon. But, as yet, when I count us over, none lacks.
Father, mother, Algy, Bobby, the Brat, Tou Tou. Slightly as I have
spoken of them to myself, and conscientiously as I have promised myself
to derive no pleasure from their society, and even to treat them with
distant coolness, if they are, any of them, and Bobby especially--it is
he that I most mistrust--more joyfully disposed than I think fitting,
yet my heart has been growing ever warmer and warmer at the thought of
them, as Christmas-time draws nigh; and now, as I kiss their firm, cold,
healthy cheeks--(I declare that Bobby's cheeks are as hard as marbles),
I know how I have lied to myself.

Father is not in quite so good a humor as I could have wished, his man
having lost his hat-box _en route_, and consequently his nose is rather
more aquiline than I think desirable.

"Do not be alarmed!" says Bobby, in a patronizing aside, introducing me,
as if I were a stranger, to f