CHRISTMAS EVE.

Christmas Eve! I sit idly by my window, listening to the rapid patter of the rain upon the shingles and the wild whistle of the wind as it plays around the gables, or draws weird music from the telegraph wires stretched between the house tops, and upon which dangles the ghost of many a schoolboy’s kite. Christmas Eve! and I am not yet invited out to dinner! what can this mean? Am I then left to wither for want of attention, like some poor shrub plucked from a garden and planted in a graveyard? Well, let it be so. Alone thoughI am, I nevertheless enjoy myself hugely, and it requires considerable to enliven me now. There was a time when I could be moved to mirth by very little. The desperate efforts of a one-legged grasshopper describing circles while endeavoring to leap straight ahead, would amuse me for hours together. But it is not so now; I turn from such scenes to bury my eyes in the pages of profound works, and it is meet and proper I should.

For the last half hour I have been watching an old washerwoman stealing, as I think, a neighbor’s wood. It is barely possible that she is taking this method of paying herself for services rendered at the tub. Be this as it may, the wood is going. There is no mistake about that.

It is interesting to me, as it furnishes food for comment, and keeps the mind from lagging too long around the saddening fact that Time is writing lines upon my brow “with his antique pen.” Besides it is holiday season, and though I am not able to be charitable to a great degree, I can at least afford to be indifferent in this case.

The washerwoman is doubtless a hard-working and deserving old body, who perhaps has sunk her whole week’s earnings in a Christmas turkey, that her children’s hearts may be made glad and their stomachs full; and it would be a great pity if it should be spoiled i’ the cooking for the want of fuel.

I waive the crime, and speak of the facts from a disinterested stand-point. I have been such a diligent scholar in the severe school of experience, that I have learned to look upon my own misfortunes lightly, and certainly can behold—with an unmoistened eye—my neighbor’s choicest sticks noiselessly slipping into an adjoining yard. Besides, my neighbor can afford to lose a few. To make my position good, I entrench myself behind the following fact: To be in the fashion, he pays the price of a good-sized farm for seats at the opera, where the language is as foreign to his understanding as South Sea Island gibberish. While he indifferently beholds such a wasteful running at the bung, why should I assume the busybody’srôleand clap my finger on the dripping spigot?

Besides, I saw his wife last evening with fullyfour yards of expensive satin trailing in the dust. It was my misfortune to be walking directly behind her. As the crowd was pressing me onward, I was obliged to dance a sailor’s hornpipe around the hall, in order to keep from treading upon her skirts. It needed not the grins of lookers-on to assure me that I was cutting a ridiculous figure.

I am now enjoying my revenge! Indirectly though it comes, it is none the less sweet or acceptable. On the contrary, it is rather more gratifying, as it calls for no action on my part, but simply to keep my mouth hermetically sealed. The poet truly sings:—

“Time at last sets all things even.”

It has been in this case much quicker than I expected. As the skinny white arm stretches up out of the gloom of the washerwoman’s yard, and another billet shoots from the pile and disappears like a star from the firmament of heaven, I feel that a load is lifted from my heart, and I am reaping revenge.

Stay! what is this? a note, that all the evening escaped my notice. Lo! an aroma issuesfrom it, sweet as Cytherea’s breath! It is an invitation, as I live, to help dissect a Christmas turkey! Sound the timbrel, beat the tom-tom. I am not forgotten yet!

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESP.319, changed “shovin’ of it” to “shovin’ all of it”.Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.Footnotes were re-indexed using numbers and collected together at the end of the chapter.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

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