to my annoyance, it was a letter from said good-by to me with tender effusion, Mrs. Ellis, which I found waiting for me to Josephine Ellis with scarcely concealed in the bureau, directed in her pretty, old-relief. "You will write daily, and tell fashioned writing. me about Fina," said Sophy wistfully, and holding me by both hands. "I can't bear to leave her." And her eyes winked and radiated as they did when she was moved.

"She has the best of doctors, at any rate," said Mrs. King, wishing to console Sophy. "And you know, Sophy, he has promised to come up and tell us about them all."

"Then we need not trouble you with letters," said Josephine quickly. "You will hear all you want to hear from Doctor Adams."

"If I were not afraid of being more hindrance than help, I would come off at once," the old lady wrote. My heart is with you, and with little Fina, and my child Josephine. Dearest Miss Williamson, I know I can trust your kindness and discretion. I hear from my daughter that Dr. Adams is at Meyringen. It is easy to surmise what has brought him once more upon the scene. Pray take care that my dear child is not carried away by any passing feeling of pity. He is a complete stranger to me and mine; he does not belong to anybody I have ever met any- Sophy opened her eyes. "You needn't where. You can understand what my write if you don't feel inclined," she said anxieties must be when I think of my good-temperedly; "but I shall be always poor girl's future, and how I have re- grateful for letters, and I will get everygretted this wayward fancy of hers. But thing ready for you when you come." all the same, it is possible, Rose says, that we may have been hasty in our conclusions; and if you should have an opportunity, pray give my compliments to Dr. Adams."

And so, after behaving in this unconscionable manner, and insulting a person of whom we knew nothing, we were now prepared graciously to change our minds and send him our compliments. It was all very well, but I was far from certain that the doctor had not changed his. The Ellis family seemed to expect that the whole world was made for them and their excellences. On the whole it seemed to me that if the doctor changed his mind it would not be a bad thing for him. Sophy would be much cleverer, more livable, cheerful, and comfortable than Josephine, and might suit him a great deal better. Ah! what treason was this? Forgive me, solemn hills, and steadfast, ever-fixed stars! Is love a bargain? Is it a bar gain to be weighed and sold and bartered? or is it a blessing, a mystery, unexplained, granted to man in mercy, and coming to redeem and shape anew the pangs and sordid schemes of daily life?

"I beg your pardon," Josephine said suddenly, all ashamed, and looking very charming as she came up and flung her arms round Sophy's neck and kissed her, and Sophy gave back her kiss with a friendly nod.

To be ugly is quite a different education from that of being beautiful. As a rule, ugly people are less shy, and much more polite than the beautiful; their friendship is perhaps less fastidious. Josephine was older than Sophy, but she knew far less of the world, she was more reserved, less able to battle with life. I had come to understand the poor doctor's odd estrangement, and the meaning of a certain irritable manner which had puzzled me at first. The doctor, with all his simplicity, knew something of men and women. He was too observant, too much used to watch his plants and his insects, not to mark peculiarities in the people among whom he lived. Sophy's undisguised, warm-hearted admiration was touching but bewildering too. Here was a woman all ready to love him, and there was the woman he had loved. Shy, prim, jealous, not indifferent, as I knew, but My perplexities were solved by no less how could he know it? - perhaps he could a person than Sophy's father, who rejoined not help contrasting the two, not always his wife and daughter at the end of a in Josephine's favor. And in the same week. He would not hear of remain-way Fina loved her aunt already with ing at Meyringen. Fina had her own something of the sweet, wayward worship friends, he said; the place was close, very close, and stuffy; he heard there was a good cook at Rosenlaui; he wanted to get higher up. Sophy, very loth, very reluctant, came with tears in her eyes to take leave of us all. It was a great pang to her to have to go just then. She

she had given her mother, but Sophy was her friend and playfellow and companion. Poor Josephine felt as if here, too, Sophy came between her and her heart's desire.

One day there was a great storm; the thunder echoed overhead among the mountain peaks and crannies. Then a

along slate cornices on precipices under the hanging snow masses in the Himalayan “Abode of Snow; or Major Burnaby, in his ride to Khiva in the cold that was almost too much for his Cossack guides.

rough skipper and his crew clinging to | setting his face to the westward across the tiller and the frozen shrouds, in seas the "Great Lone Land;" Mr. Andrew that sweep the deck from stem to stern, Wilson carried as an invalid on a litter, and weather that would tear any canvas into ribbons. In the safe little sea-boat, that is slow at the best under sail, they have to bide their time and possess their souls in patience as they lie becalmed under the lee of the ice-cliffs, or dodge the set of the ice-packs. There was What go far towards nerving the men scarcely room to "swing a cat" in the of the north to the enjoyment of their tiny cabin that just served as a refuge. winters, or of Arctic weather, are the Overtasked and short-handed as they pleasures of hope and of contrast. Even were, they had often to turn in "all stand- the employés of the Hudson Bay Coming," ready to answer the boatswain's pany have the prospect of basking through call at a moment's notice; and they ex- their long summer day; and the hardiest pected the inevitable arrival of the scurvy of us would scarcely care to cast in our on salt junk, weevilly ship-biscuit, and lot for life with the Esquimaux. Shaw new rum. Preserved meats and lime- and Forsyth, and the travellers who have juice were as yet undreamt of; and their crossed the Hindu Kush, looked forward medicine and luxury was the quid of to- to a welcome in the Vale of Kashmir, or bacco, at once the best of sedatives and in the rich vegetation that encircles Kashstimulants. It is a long stride from those gar, sacred to the admirers of the "Araforlorn hopes of adventure to the well-bian Nights;" while Burnaby, when he found and strongly-manned expeditions had left the steppes behind him, drew we have lately been sending out to the pole. But even with all the appliances that science and experience can suggest or liberality supply, the lives of Arctic explorers must be trying at the best; and the soundest constitutions are strained if not shattered. Yet the only difficulty in finding the crews is the picking and choosing in the crush of volunteers; and cheerfulness under perfect discipline does its best to command success, though the sole distractions out of doors through the long, dark winter, are constitutionals along the snow-paths kept clear to the observatory," or sledging parties carried out with heroic resolution.

For when you change passive endurance into a grapple with difficulties, the spirit will rise irrepressibly to meet them. We have travellers wrapped in the casings of furs and woollens they dare not cast, facing the frozen blasts on the steppes of Tartary, or scrambling up the highest passes in our hemisphere- those gutter-pipes which drain the "Roof of the World."

We can recall a dozen stories of recent winter travelling adventures, where we may be sure that the pleasures predominated over the pains, though the adventurers, who were gently horn and bred, must have suffered as intensely as they endured doggedly. Such as Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle hewing their way, with "Mr. and Mrs. Assineboine," through the precipitous forests on the banks of the Fraser River; Major Butler likewise

bridle among the gardens and pomegranate groves of the Khivan canals. Tourists in Europe have experienced delights of the kind when, after the damp and gloom of a raw Roman winter, they have taken their first spring rides in the Campagna, when it was bursting almost before their eyes into one vivid blush of violets; or when, after a long day and night passed in the old-fashioned diligence in the frozen wind on the heights of the Morena, they have rubbed their eyes, with the break of dawn, among the fountains and orange-trees of sunny Cordova. A balmy breath of spring in winter is soothingly refreshing as an oasis in the desert. But comparatively very little heat goes a long way with most Englishmen; and in a really tropical climate they generally feel at their worst. Even an unusually warm summer in England makes the life of too many of our fellowcreatures a melancholy spectacle, till they begin to pick up again with the shortening days.

Very different it is in the beginnings of our old-fashioned English winter " with men who have wealth, health, and strength in moderation! We believe it is the lightness of feeling, following on the first steady fall of the temperature below the freezing-point, that explains those effusive rhapsodies on seasonable" jollity which characterize our popular Christmas literature. We are really in excellent spirits, and perhaps the bracing air has gone to our heads. We see every

66

thing not precisely in couleur de rose, but | Some centuries later, and in "Bracein the dazzling radiancy of sparkling frost, bridge Hall," we see how our old English and are in the humor to listen to absurdi- fashion of keeping Christmas impressed ties and sentimentalities as sound enough sense to be fitting to the time of year. But it is the modern school of Christmas writers who are become sickly, stilted, and sentimental; and for that Dickens is chiefly responsible. He began so admirably in a flow of natural humor and pathos, that he was encouraged to parody himself, and so the picturesqueness of "Pickwick" and the city idyl of the "Christmas Carol" came down to the level of the latest of his Christmas annuals. But the early Christmas pictures by masters of genius must touch sympathetic chords in every bosom, and make misery itself often feel sadly mirthful in memory of the frolics of happier times. Without going further back in our literature, take Scott's famous introduction to the sixth canto of "Marmion,".

Heap on more wood! the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
We'll keep our Christmas merry still.

a sympathetic American. The New Englanders, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe shows in her " Poganuc People," have a pretty notion of perpetuating those traditions that were carried over the Atlantic in the "Mayflower," although the early Pilgrim fathers were Puritans. But in a new country, with the go-ahead energy that has grubbed the forests and split the trees into shingles; with its practically-minded men and its hard utilitarianism, its brandnew buildings and its bald-faced meetinghouses, the associations must be lacking that give the season its solemnity. There are no old squires and old Master Simons; no old blue-coated serving-men bred under the rooftree of the hall; no old polished mahogany dining-tables, or old family portraits whose burnished frames are brightened up for the occasion with misletoe and holly-berries; no cellars of rare old wines and ales that flow at the festal Christmas-tide like water; above all, no quaint old Norman church, where ments have been as yet undesecrated by the pews of oak and the medieval monu

the aesthetic restorer. Then Dickens

we

-never

scendants in sæcula sæculorum. We

The ring of the metre sounds like the church-bells to a devotee, or the dinnergong to a hungry man. What a striking picture of the kindly joviality that levels Popularized the Bracebridge Halls ranks and sets a truce to cares! The his delightful sketches of the Manor will not say that he vulgarized them-in baron's hall, where the flames from the Farm. For though we fancy "the fine great log fire that went roaring and crackold host" dropped his 's, though he welling up the vast chimney, flashed their comed that very rough diamond, the light on merry faces and burnished flag- inimitable Bob Sawyer, as a familiar ons; the stately baron in the chimney- friend, and extended his hospitalities to a corner, unbending for once; the "heir with roses in his shoes," flirting with vil-theless the Manor Farm must live in the seedy strolling actor like Jingle, lage maiden with redder roses in her memories of Englishmen and their decheeks; the boar's head, bedecked with bays and rosemaries, grinning on the festal board among sirloins and huge bickers of plum-porridge, and wassail-bowls bobbing with the roasted crabs; the tales of the hunting-field by flood and fell; the stories of venerable, time-honored superstitions that made the hearers shudder even in that merry crowd; the mumming, the singing, the laughing, and the dancing, while the winds that howled and whistled through the trees and the loopholes in the battlements, drove the smokewreaths back again down the chimney, and scattered the sparks from the blazing roots. Little recked kinsmen, tenants, and cottagers, of trifling inconveniences like these, in those Christmas gambols

that

could cheer

The poor man's heart through half the year.

cordially echo the hearty sentiment of Mr. Weller: "Your master's a wery pretty notion of keepin' everything up, my dear. I never see such a sensible man as he is, or such a reg'lar gen'l'man ; as we assent to the grateful utterance of Mr. Pickwick, when sitting down "by the huge fire of logs, to a substantial supper and a mighty bowl of wassail"—"This is indeed comfort."

But the whole of the winter sketches, of which that supper on Christmas Eve is but one in a series, are as delightful as they are characteristic of manners that bound roads on the outside of the Mugare departing: the drive along the frostgleton mail, after the codfish and the barrels of oysters had been forced into the gaping foreboot; the change of horses at the inn in the market town - it

was only a slow coach, we must remem-fingers. The birds are gathered into ragber when Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Tup-ged balls on the boughs; the blackbirds man came so near being left behind, when and starlings are hopping gingerly about they had run up the yard to refresh on the lawn, like so many jackdaws of themselves at the tap; the walk along Rheims, blighted under the ban of the the frozen lanes to the farm; the meeting Church; the very tomtits seem limp and with the house-party, the reception, the depressed; while the robins, pressed by supper, the rubbers, and the hot elder- the cravings of appetite, come almost tapwine to follow; the wedding next day, and ping at the windows as they ask for their the breakfast that sent the poor relations crumbs. After all, it may be hoped that to bed. Of course there is a dash of the sufferings of those country creatures Christmas romance in the pretty fancy are nothing worse than may be endured that elderly gentlemen fresh from town and soon forgotten. These birds will be could hold out through the rustic hospi- fed from the breakfast-room windows, and tality of the farm, and rise each successive there are still hips and haws in the hedgemorning all the brisker and the brighter rows for their fellows. The boy has had for it. We should surmise that Mr. a morning meal before turning out of his Pickwick must have been troubled by cottage, and there are worse maladies in nightmares after those late and heavy the world than chilblains, while exercise suppers; while Mr. Tupman was the very will set youthful blood in circulation. But subject for flying twinges of the gout. your thoughts travel away to the poor in But there can be no question that, for the great towns, who must rise to fireless keeping dyspepsia at bay, there is nothing hearths and shiver on short commons. like country life and jovial company at a After all, such sufferings, like the poor time when you feel bound to feast and themselves, will be always with us, and make merry; and there are charmingly in winter time the souls of the well-connatural touches in that scene on the ice ditioned must be exceptionally open to which preceded Mr. Pickwick's immer- melting charity. If you cannot help being sion in the pond. It is a rough English bright and cheery yourself, you feel the translation of the hearty communion of a more bound to consider your less fortuScottish curling-match. Old men become nate fellow-mortals. Christopher North boys again in the biting air, and take to put it very neatly and truly in one of the frolicking like cart-horses turned out in a "Noctes" for this month of December. meadow. 66 'Ceremony doffs her pride" He had been eulogizing winter, more suo, at the Manor Farm as in the baronial over a blazing fire before the well spread hall; and there are old Wardle and the board in the blue parlor at Ambrose's; fat boy, Mr. Pickwick and his faithful and the Shepherd had been chiming in Sam, Messrs. Snodgrass, Sawyer, Winkle, with the praises of cold and curling, etc., all "keepin' the pot a-bilin'," and beef and greens. Tickler, sitting in following each other along the slide as if moody reserve, strikes a dissonant note. their very lives depended on it. "This outrageous merriment grates my Such bright winter pictures have, of spirits. 'Twill be a severe winter, and I course, their sombre side. You tumble think of the poor." North answers out of bed to see the country covered with "Are not wages good and work plenty, a dazzling mantle. Every twig and slen- and is not charity a British virtue?" der spray is enveloped in icy tracery. And we trust that, in this season of 1880, There are festoons of icicles depending we may write a cheerful article on winter from the window-sashes, and the panes pleasures without feeling sympathies or are interlaced with a delicate fretwork conscience unduly weighted. We hope that may shame those masterpieces of Moorish art that are still the marvels of the connoisseur. Sparkling in the cold sunshine, it all looks cheerful enough as you contemplate it from a comfortably warmed room, unless, indeed, your soul be set upon hunting, and your horses are fretting in their stalls. But even in the country your pleasures may be dashed by reminders of the existence of suffering. There goes a thinly-clad urchin under the windows, shrugging his shoulders to gether, and blowing upon his frost-nipped

that work will be plenty and wages good, for trade is steadily, if slowly, reviving, and the useful virtues of providence and temperance have been growing with the working classes since 1825. Charity is still a British virtue; while institutions that were then unthought of have been founded, and the organization of dispassionate relief has been indefinitely extended. We remember, for our comfort too, as a fact incontestably established by statistics, that cold is far less destructive than damp to life and consequently to