Listen to _where_ it was Xmas.

It was Xmas Eve on the Old Homestead. Reader, do you know, by sight,
the Old Homestead? In the pauses of your work at your city desk,
where you have grown rich and avaricious, does it never rise before
your mind's eye, the quiet old homestead that knew you as a boy
before your greed of gold tore you away from it? The Old Homestead
that stands beside the road just on the rise of the hill, with its
dark spruce trees wrapped in snow, the snug barns and the straw
stacks behind it; while from its windows there streams a shaft of
light from a coal-oil lamp, about as thick as a slate pencil that
you can see four miles away, from the other side of the cedar swamp
in the hollow. Don't talk to me of your modern searchlights and
your incandescent arcs, beside that gleam of light from the coal-oil
lamp in the farmhouse window. It will shine clear to the heart
across thirty years of distance. Do you not turn, I say, sometimes,
reader, from the roar and hustle of the city with its ill-gotten
wealth and its godless creed of mammon, to think of the quiet
homestead under the brow of the hill? You don't! Well, you skunk!

It was Xmas Eve.

The light shone from the windows of the homestead farm. The light
of the log fire rose and flickered and mingled its red glare on the
windows with the calm yellow of the lamplight.

John Enderby and his wife sat in the kitchen room of the farmstead.
Do you know it, reader, the room called the kitchen?--with the open
fire on its old brick hearth, and the cook stove in the corner. It