Charles Dickens.]

THE ROUND GAME OF THE CHRISTMAS BOWL.

23

same. There is not so much as a bottle of
hock in the whole cellar; they will let the
cat sleep on the rug in the dining-room, and
the carriage is the same old-fashioned "tub"
as ever.

However, he gets over baby's birthday
tolerably well, although he wishes Jack didn't
know so many farmers. Besides, Jack will
nurse baby Junior himself, and will hawk out
baby Senior to shake his diminutive fists, at
new comers in general. He feels glad to get
back again to the rectory, but it is very
slow there. His father doesn't know the
Montmorencies, nor the Honourable Charley
Cracker, and wonders why he did not get the
fellowship at St. Swithin. Furthermore, Bessy
and Fanny have both got beaux, and the beaux
are not University men. Tom Harris, the
surgeon, would never do to introduce to
the Honourable Charley, although Tom has
a snug little practice, and has furnished his
house in a style that will outlast half a thou-
sand University friendships, and will make
Bessy a thoroughly good husband. Fanny's
intended is the new curate, who is not over
High Church; in fact, Horace thinks him
rather a " pump," and wonders how he can
live upon a hundrjd and twenty pounds a
year.

Horace owes a few odd hundred pounds;
but Standish and Co. and Stilty and Cab-
bagenet are very quiet as yet, and he will
give them a " few pounds " as soon as he
can spare it. In fact, half the bills have
not yet been sent in, for his debts are mostly
of latter-day University growth. He has
done respectably well in the school, but
nothing more. He has, however, a large
connexion, picks up pupils, and does hope to
pick up something else: indefinitely oscillat-
ing between the living of Dumdum, in the
gift of the Montmorency family (his scholar-
ship will give him a title); something under
government (he knows the Prime Minister's
aunt's second cousin); and the Woolsack. But
all his friends, who used to hear him decide
the fate of the Continent in a speech of twenty
minutes, at the Vox et præterea Nihil Associa-
tion, fill him with notions of briefs, oyster
breakfasts, and the Temple. The difficulty
is, the money. Cold-blooded as he is grown
to home associations, he has no heart to rob
Bessy and Fanny of the few hundreds their
father can give with them; still less to stint
the younger members of their just meed of
what he has himself enjoyed. But he is an
unhappy creature. He wants everything and
everybody–––except the things and people
around him; he is reserved where he used to
be open, parsimonious from necessity where he
was once generous. He cannot settle to any-
thing, and the few days he has been at home
have bored him as much as the conversation
of the Honourable Charley Avould have bored
his father. Other people perceive the change,
and even he begins to have a glimpse of self-
reproach.

But, just as he is wondering why the deuce
he thought of spending Christmas at home,
a reprieve arrives in the shape of a letter
from The Honorable Charley; who, having
in an evil hour accepted an invitation to his
guardian's, finds he has nobody to smoke or
drink pale ale with, and conceives a sudden
desire for reading. The pay is liberal; and,
if it were not, getting away from home for
the remaining nine or ten days of the vaca-
tion would be a fair equivalent for any
amount of instruction likely to be imbibed
by the mental absorbents of Charley's mind.

Mrs. De Lisle cannot bear the idea of her
'' dear boy " leaving home before even the
pudding is finished, especially as Jack Har-
rington has invited the whole family to keep
Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night at Jack's!
Noisy children, country dances, perhaps snap-
dragon, and perhaps blindman's buff, with
sisters Bessy and Fanny slipping out on the
staircase, and coming in with heightened
complexions, looking as if they had been
kissed by goblins in human shape. Twelfth
Night characters, too! Perhaps draw a love
motto with Polly Bright, the old half-pay
admiral's daughter, about whom he once
liked to be teased. Never!

And so Horace goes away. His father, per-
haps, feels but little grieved; for he hopes and
thinks that his son's journey may tend to
his future advantage, and he is too sensible to
cherish that home-sickness which sometimes
prevents a man from ever making a home for
himself. But his mother cannot bear his sub-
lime disdain of all the little innocent things
that once called forth his highest approbation.
She is almost afraid Polly Bright looks thin
and anxious; and she remembers that, just
three years ago, Horace joked about his
"little wife; " and she wishes that, even by
one kind look, he had repeated the joke. It is
all one to Horace, who is gone.

To be happy, Horace, or to be really
merry? My friend, my friend, a word in
your ear! You may be quite sure that you
have grown too fast, when you find that you
have outgrown Christmas. It is a very bad
sign indeed.

THE ROUND GAME OF THE
CHRISTMAS BOWL.

[THIS Round Game, which comes, origi-
nally, from Fairy-Land, is thus played. The
Pool of the game is a capacious circular
bowl, or basin, made of ice. It is some sixty
or seventy feet in circumference, and all
round the rim there is stuck a hedge of holly-
boughs, in full berry, interspersed with
coloured lamps and silver bells. Everybody
who is inspired by Christmas festivities comes
to put into the Pool. He is to put in some-
thing which is his pride. In doing this he
generally throws in something which is
equally his trouble; and thus, by doing a
generous act at Christmas, in throwing away