Christmas came, and the holidays with it. As Miss Plinlimmon sang--

"Welcome, Christmas! Welcome, Yule!
It brings the schoolboy home from school.
[N.B.--Vulgarly pronounced 'schule' in the West of England.]
Puddings and mistletoe and holly,
With other contrivances for banishing melancholy:
Boar's head, for instance--of which I have never partaken,
But the name has associations denied to ordinary bacon."

Dear soul, she had been waiting at the door--so Sally, the cook,
informed me--for about an hour, listening for the coach, and greeted
me with a tremulous joy between laughter and tears. Before leading
me to my father, however, she warned me that I should find him
changed; and changed he was, less perhaps in appearance than in the
perceptible withdrawal of his mind from all earthly concerns.
He seldom spoke, but sat all day immobile, with the lids of his blind
eyes half lowered, so that it was hard to tell whether he brooded or
merely dozed. On Christmas Day he excused himself from walking to
church with us, and upon top of his excuse looked up with a sudden
happy smile--as though his eyes really saw us--and quoted Waller's
famous lines:

"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decay'd,
Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made. . . ."

To me it seemed rather that, as its home broke up, the soul withdrew
little by little, and contracted itself like the pupil of an eye, to
shrink to a pinpoint and vanish in the full admitted ray.