respectable Kelmar, and some others, to become faint in the legs,
and double up, at exciting points of the drama), a teeming world of
fancies so suggestive and all-embracing, that, far below it on my
Christmas Tree, I see dark, dirty, real Theatres in the day-time,
adorned with these associations as with the freshest garlands of the
rarest flowers, and charming me yet.

But hark! The Waits are playing, and they break my childish sleep!
What images do I associate with the Christmas music as I see them
set forth on the Christmas Tree? Known before all the others,
keeping far apart from all the others, they gather round my little
bed. An angel, speaking to a group of shepherds in a field; some
travellers, with eyes uplifted, following a star; a baby in a
manger; a child in a spacious temple, talking with grave men; a
solemn figure, with a mild and beautiful face, raising a dead girl
by the hand; again, near a city gate, calling back the son of a
widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people looking through the
opened roof of a chamber where he sits, and letting down a sick
person on a bed, with ropes; the same, in a tempest, walking on the
water to a ship; again, on a sea-shore, teaching a great multitude;
again, with a child upon his knee, and other children round; again,
restoring sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the
deaf, health to the sick, strength to the lame, knowledge to the
ignorant; again, dying upon a Cross, watched by armed soldiers, a
thick darkness coming on, the earth beginning to shake, and only one
voice heard, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Still, on the lower and maturer branches of the Tree, Christmas
associations cluster thick. School-books shut up; Ovid and Virgil
silenced; the Rule of Three, with its cool impertinent inquiries,