A Christmas Story.

Otago Witness, Issue 2088, 1 March 1894, Page 49

A Christmas Story.

I once wrote for a Christmas Number a story which was designed to treat our annual carnival from a philosophical standpoint. All went well with the hero and heroine ; -their troth was plighted ; parents and guardians and banking accounts made a chorus of approval ; the chorus of true love had not a wrinkle. But one midsummer day the hero was greatly preoccupied. He was an editor, and the shadow of a Christmas Number had fallen upon his soul. •' How delightful ! " exclaimed his affianced, when she learned the subject of his thoughts. "Of course you will write a story, a real Christmas story, for the number, and after dinner on Christmas Day you will read to us all by the fire before the lamps are lighted, and I shall sit near you and wonder whether the ghosts will really come, because your ghosts, dearest, will seem quite, quite real." They were walking in a beautiful glade, and as thure was nobody in sight, she leaned her fair young head upon his shoulder. But putting her aside somewhat roughly, he took six haßty strides, like Eugene Aram, and thus addreased her astonished ear : "Emmeline, this is the moment that I have dreaded long. I should have spoken of this before our engagement, but I was a coward" — he smote his brow — "and I feared to lose you." "What can you mean ? " she gasped. "I have kept it from you — may I bo forgiven !— but now you must know that I suffer from " — his voice fell to a whisper — " the black heritage of dyspepsia ! My father and grandfather wrote tales of Christmas feasting and junketing, and lived up to them ! Before you stands a miserable man, to whom a family dinner on Christmas Day is a dream of horror. As I look at you I see the hideous sausage coiling round your neck and the blue flame of snapdiagon in your eye. Ah ! " He sank to the ground and buried his face in his hands. But she was cold and stern. "Ernest," she said calmly, "this is a very bad case of heredity, and heredity is quite incompatible with our romance. I have been brought up on the family dinner and the Yuletide log, and to abandon them would be to abandon the safeguards of domestic life, and let in anarchy." "Enough!" he cried. "Let us part. We are the victims of the great war between the new philosophy and the old beliefs. Farewell ! And when you sit among your aunts and pull the Tom Smith cracker " But his emotion choked his utterance, and he fled. How did they spend their Christmas. Day ? In a lonely attic, over a. rasher of bacon

and one small coal (Wallsend was then £5 a hundredweight), shivered a man of careworn but determined aspect, a volume of Schopenhauer in his hand, and another of Hegel on his knee. In a comfortably-furnished room, surrounded by mature but sparkling spinsters, in one hand an orange, in the other a glass of pott (oranges and port alwayß followed the midday turkey and the 5 o'clock jam on the great festival day in that circle), sat Bmmeline with a hectic flush and a quivering lip. Presently the spinster aunts looked at her and said, "My dear, you have not asked us your riddle." She knew that to them Christmas would not be Christmas without the conundrum she had put every year since she could lisp. She made a brave effort : " Why is a bald head like heav ? " but it was too much, and she swooned away. — English Illustrated Magazine.