butter-firkins, and hams; while its scarlet
berries are sunk into the sides of cheeses, in
devices and letters, wishing a merry Christmas
to all purchasers.

Christmas and good eating are joined
together (indissolubly, save by Twelfth
Day) in Leadenhall Market, where the
bold-faced gas throws groves of ducks
and geese and capons, into Rembrandt-like
chiaro-scuro; where it flares impudently upon
corpulent turkeys which have been sent to all
sorts of Coventries in the ribbon line, but
which seem not the least abashed, but, rather, a
trifle the bolder, for the parti-coloured humiliation.
Cochin China fowls with shrill voices,
and bargain-making housewives swell a chorus,
of which I cannot exactly catch the words,
but which, signifies, I am sure, that Christmas
and good cheer are conjoined. The very lop-
eared rabbits anatomising cabbage-leaves in
their little dens, twinkle their bead-like eyes
in a merry manner, as though they would say
that, in consideration of the season, they would
not object to be smothered in onions at a
moment's notice. As to the sucking-pigs
lying innocently dead in snowy cerements
with their rosy little trotters turned up,
they smile as only sucking-pigs can smile.
"Bless you all," they seem to say; " this is
Christmas. If you prefer pig to beef or
turkey, eat us by all means. Put lemons in
our mouths, and scorch our innocuous cuticle
into crackling. Beat up those guileless
brains of ours into sauce; scrunch our bones;
simper over our delicate layers of fat; only
be thankful when you have eaten us, for this
is Christmas."

Christmas and good cheer have cemented
an union, (never to be repeated, save in the
Opera season, when the guinea bouquets and
half-a-crown Camellia Japonicas oust the
fruit from their stalls,) in the central avenue
of Covent Garden Market. Ruddy oranges
that have sunned themselves, I warrant, in
their time in Spanish maidens' eyes in sultry
southern islands, and in those hot landscapes
of Spain, where you can see nought for miles
but hot blue sky and hot red earth, and hot
white houses, and hot dusky mountain sierras
in the distance; sly smooth-faced Barcelona
nuts, which seem by their looks-not worth a
farthing the gross, but which are, notwithstanding,
marvellous good eating—like rich
men who wear ragged coats; luscious black
grapes; fat fellows of chestnuts, troubling
themselves very little at the thought of
going to torment in a fire-shovel; sulky,
reserved, Brazil nuts, who won't come out of
their corrugated shells for all the parlour-
doors you may scrunch them in, or all the
case-knives you may hack them with; all
these, with the juicy Marie Louise and mouille-
bouche pears, the blushing apples of Kent, and
more hardened, impudent, dusky Ribstoue
pippins, seern to my mind to cry out with rich
fruity voices, that Christmas is come, that
they are anxious to meet with their deserts.
Oranges long for the parlour magician, who
is to turn them into sucking-pigs, and cups,
and false sets of teeth; cobs, Barcelonas, and
filberts, sigh for the nutcrackers; even the
surly Brazil nuts growl forth (to my ear),
'' Crack us and eat us if you like (or can); if
not, be jovial, and burn the oil out of us in
the flame of the candle." As to the apples
they are pining for the knife that is to peel
them. Happy apples! for-their peel (entire
and cut without fracture or abrasion), cast
over a lady's shoulder will twine and twine
till it forms the initials of that lady's sweetheart.

Streets and squares, markets and hucksters'
stalls, market baskets, costermongers' carts,
pastrycooks' boxes; the grocer's window
running over with pudding gear, almonds and
raisins, and candied citron; the butcher's
shop, where the ruddy man in blue seems to
have slaughtered mammoths and mastodons
this Christmas instead of ordinary beef and
mutton, and sits smiling on his block, eyeing
triumphantly a megatherium of an ox he has
hung up outside—a bovine Daniel Lambert,
with yellow fat on him like the layer of
clarified butter in a pot of anchovy paste—an
alderman ox with ribbons in his ribs, and a
nosegay stuck on his huge brisket, giving
occasionally (the butcher, not the ox) a sly
Christmas wink to his pretty wife, who sits
smiling over her cash-book at the other end
of the shop in a gas-lit bower of beef; not
in only these shops, but in out-of-the-way little
sweetstuff warehouses, where a double stock
of alecampane and " Bonaparte's ribs " is
fighting for the shop-board with small, weazen
sticks of parti-coloured tallow, popularly
believed to be capable of burning in toy tin
sconces of rude design, and known as Christmas
candles; in slap-bang shops of an inferior
kind—a very inferior kind—where the proprietor
has been cutting roast beef since early
dawn, and the proprietor's wife has been slicing
up formidable looking rolls and globes of large
plum puddings, whose number is uncountable,
whose perfume riding on the gale as in
Araby the blest, is positively maddening
to the three barefooted boys who have been
consuming a Barmecide feast of roast and
boiled meats through the windows for hours;
in almost every dwelling in every street, in
every quarter of this gigantic city, Christmas
is heralded in with a clatter of knives
and forks, a flourishing of spoons, and a
jingling of glasses. In courtly chapels Royal,
where doles of bread are given to the poor;
in miserable garrets, where the addition
of another red herring is made to the always
scanty meal, on the ground that it is Christmas
there, low down, as well as-elsewhere,
higher up; Christmas is brought in with a
jovial, genial sort of—  let us not call it by a
harsh name—gormandising.

As we trudge through the streets everybody
seems to be eating and drinking,
or preparing to eat and drink. The crossing