letters finds one of his sweetest and purest rewards; the mind and heart which hospitably receive his truest thought and honour him for it must always command an answering glow of gratitude. It is the vulgar love of novelty, publicity, mere cleverness, from which the man of genius shrinks. Perhaps the bitterest experience in the life of the Teacher of Galilee was the eagerness with which the crowds looked for miracles, the apathy with which they listened to truth. Through the noise and roar of the shallow current of popular applause there runs for every genuine man of letters a deep, quiet current of intelligent sympathy and love which fertilises his life wherever it comes in contact with it. Of this true and honest homage to what is best and noblest in one's work, Sir Henry Taylor gives an illustration: “I met in the train yesterday a meagre, sickly, peevish-looking, elderly man, not affecting to be quite a gentleman and on showing him the photographs of Lionel Tennyson which I carried in my hand, he spoke of In Memoriam,' and said he had made a sort of churchyard of it, and had

appropriated some passage of it to each of his departed friends, and that he read it every Sunday, and never came to the bottom of the depths of it.

More to be

prized this, I thought, than the criticism.

of critics, however plauditory."

CHAPTER VI

CHRISTMAS EVE

HE world has been full of mysteries to-day; everybody has gone about weighted with secrets. The children's faces have fairly shone with expectancy, and I enter easily into the universal dream which at this moment holds all the children of Christendom under its spell. Was there ever a wider or more loving conspiracy than that which keeps the venerable figure of Santa Claus from slipping away, with all the other old-time myths, into the forsaken wonderland of the past? Of all the personages whose marvellous doings

once filled the minds of men, he alone survives. He has outlived all the great gods, and all the impressive and poetic

conceptions which once flitted between heaven and earth; these have gone, but Santa Claus remains by virtue of a common understanding that childhood shall not be despoiled of one of its most cherished beliefs, either by the mythologist, with his sun-myth theory, or the scientist, with his heartless diatribe against superstition. There is a good deal more to be said on this subject, if this were the place to say it; even superstition has its uses, and sometimes its sound heart of truth. He who does not see in the legend of Santa Claus a beautiful faith on one side, and the naïve embodiment of a divine fact on the other, is not fit to have a place at the Christmas board. For him there should be neither carol, nor holly, nor mistletoe; they only shall keep the feast to whom all these things are but the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace.

Rosalind and myself are thoroughly orthodox when it comes to the keeping of holidays; here at least the ways of our fathers are our ways also. Orthodoxy generally consists in retaining and emphasising the disagreeable ways of the fathers,

and as we are both inclined to heterodoxy on these points, we make the more prominent our observance of the best of the oldtime habits. I might preach a pleasant little sermon just here, taking as my text the "survival of the fittest," and illustrating the truth from our own domestic ritual; but the season preaches its own sermon, and I should only follow the example of some ministers and get between the text and my congregation if I made the attempt. For weeks we have all been looking forward to this eventful evening and the still more eventful morrow. There have been hurried and whispered conferences hastily suspended at the sound of a familiar step on the stair; packages of every imaginable size and shape have been surreptitiously introduced into the house, and have immediately disappeared in all manner of out-of-the-way places; and for several weeks past one room has been constantly under lock and key, visited only when certain sharp-sighted eyes were occupied in other directions. Through all this scene of mystery Rosalind has moved sedately and with sealed lips, the common