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The Young Doctor, who was leaning against the overmantel of the stove warming himself, crossed over to Thorogood with an expression of portentous solemnity on his face. "James," he said, and laid a hand on the other's shoulder, "before you get busy on the wassail-bowl, my lad, I should like to remind you that the boat's crew will commence training for the Regatta at 7 A.M. to-morrow.

Now Ederyn was the page's name, an orphan lad whose lineage no man knew, but that he came of gentle blood all eyes could see, although as vassal 'twas his lot to wait upon the great earl's squire. "It was the Yule-tide, and the wassail-bowl passed round till boisterous mirth drowned oftentimes the minstrel's song, but Ederyn missed no word.

My readers expect a robin, and they shall have it. And a wassail-bowl, and a turkey, and a Christmas-tree, and a AUTHOR. Yes, yes; but wait. We shall come to little Elsie soon, and then perhaps it will be all right. Robert got up and shook himself. Then he shivered miserably, as the cold wind cut through him like a knife.

It was a feast of humour and a flow of fun, better than all the yule-tide fare that ever was provided fuller of good things than any Christmas pudding of plums and candied fruit-peel more warming to the cockles of one's heart, whatever those may be, than the mellowest wassail-bowl ever brimmed to over-flowing.

"Once more he sang of knights and ladyes fair, of love and death and valour; and Ederyn, the page, crept nearer to him till the harp-strings ceased to thrill. With head upon his hands, he sat and sighed. Not even when the wassail-bowl was passed with mirth and laughter did he look up. And when the graybeard minstrel saw his grief, he thought upon his question of the Yule-tide gone.

A carol was often sung when the boar's head was brought in; here is one from the collection of Wynkyn de Worde: Neither were the ale and wassail-bowl forgotten, and they circulated sometimes too often, I fear, and laid the seeds of gout and other evils, from which other generations suffer.

And still Christmas Day was at his elbow, plying him the wassail-bowl, till he roared, and hiccup'd, and protested there was no faith in dried ling, but commended it to the devil for a sour, windy, acrimonious, censorious, hy-po-crit-crit-cri-tical mess, and no dish for a gentleman.

Brand, in 1790, that at Werington, on Christmas Eve, "it was then customary for the country people to sing a wassail or drinking song, and throw the toast from the wassail-bowl to the apple-trees, in order to have a fruitful tree."

Looking on the jolly old stuff when it was red and what not, what?" "Exactly." Archie nodded. "Dear old Squiffy was always rather-a lad for the wassail-bowl. When I met him in Paris, I remember, he was quite tolerably blotto." "Precisely. And the failing has, I regret to say, grown on him since he returned from the war. My poor sister was extremely worried.

Hastening to welcome the truant with a wassail-bowl of warm milk in the kitchen, she observed another cat skulking with the timidity of an uninvited guest in an obscure corner.