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Updated: May 2, 2025
The reconciliation which followed the Christmas-time troubles of Irene and her husband had given both more prudent self-control. They guarded themselves with a care that threw around the manner of each a certain reserve which was often felt by the other as coldness. To both this was, in a degree, painful.
They were short, but seemed brimming over with happiness. Mrs. Moss didn't get any dear idea of the household at Enderby, but it was apparently all that the girl desired. Then gradually the letters began to fall off, and before Christmas-time she felt a decided change in them. They had become unsatisfactory, perfunctory; the girl seemed to be slipping away from her.
"I couldn't quite understand her," said Elizabeth Eliza, "but she seemed to think that burglars and other people might come in if the keys were the same." "Agamemnon would not sell his patent to burglars!" said Mrs. Peterkin, indignantly. "But about other people," said Elizabeth Eliza; "there is my upper drawer; the little boys might open it at Christmas-time, and their presents in it!"
As the boys grew up, they were sent to their usual outdoor work, following the plough and doing the usual agricultural labour; but still adhering to their modelling at leisure hours. At Christmas-time, Lough was very much in demand. Everybody wanted him to make models in pastry for Christmas pies, the neighbouring farmers especially, "It was capital practice," he afterwards said.
It is so that, without our thinking of it, our simple human feelings one for another at Christmas-time corroborate the mystical message which it is the church's meaning to convey by this festival of "peace and good-will to men" the power of the Invisible Love; from the mystical love of God for His world, to the no less, mystical love of mother and child, of lover and lover, of friend and friend.
For it was the very same parchment which King Louis's messenger had made Count Pierre sign to prove that he had sold to the king, for a certain sum of gold, the old Viaud farm, together with a piece of good land adjoining it; and then, at the end of the deed, as the writing was called, there were a few lines from King Louis himself, which said that in honour of the blessed Christmas-time the king took pleasure in presenting to peasant Viaud, and his heirs for ever, everything that he had bought from Count Pierre.
One poet says something of the Anglo-Indian's longing for home at Christmas-time; he speaks with melancholy of the folly of those who sell their brains for rupees and go into exile, and he appears to be ready, for his own part, to give up his share in the glory of our Empire if only he can see the friendly fields in chill December. I sympathize with him.
But this Christmas-time everything was so sad and changed, they were sure even the Christ-child would forget them. And, day by day, the little supply of coarse meal for their black bread grew smaller and smaller, and the snow became deeper, and the wintry winds blew more cold and cruelly.
This added to what his wife earned and what Sebastian gave was enough to keep bread in their mouths, but scarcely more. It was at the opening of the joyous Christmas-time that the bitterness of their poverty affected them most. The Germans love to make a great display at Christmas. It is the one season of the year when the fullness of their large family affection manifests itself.
He was pleased to superintend some of the details for a dance at Christmas-time before Virginia left Monticello, but he sat as usual on the stair-landing. There Mr. Mr. Cluyme was so charmed at the facility with which Eliphalet recounted the rise and fall of sugar and cotton and wheat that he invited Mr. Hopper to dinner.
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