EMMELINE TO HER READERS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2181, 19 December 1895, Page 31

EMMELINE TO HER READERS.

Amid all the good wishes you will have from friends and relative?, find room, dear readers, for Emmeline's, as she wishes you most heartily "a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.." For the last few months we have all been saying, young and old alike, how quickly tho year has flown 1 I wonder what has made this particular year seem so fleeting 7 No, it is not that we are growing older, for schools boys and girls can hardly feel that influence — it hasbeen a something in the air, like the unrest, and the eagerness, and the forebodings of the times, But Christmas I— the festival of the young, the special time that we mußt enjoy through them if we would erijoy it at all. To us there must always be an under tone of sadness about tbe Christmas chimes. Wistfully at their Bound we turn the pages of memory, and up from the open book float the scents and sweets of tbe past, while here a page is margined with black, and there is a vacent place where a friend bas changed, or a dream has vanished 1 Every year at Christmas time there comes a poetic imEginativs revival of our religious sentiments. There is something so strong and yet so tender in that appeal of the birthday of Christ : It touches us to-day as though it were fresh in Bethlehem of Jadea. We feel a new wave of simple faith and unaffected earnestness as we sit \n church amid the wreathed pillars and see the Ely-decked altar and the great white cross of waxen blooms that gleams above it. The Christmas anthems enwrap as with a eoti

delight. What a little thing is sooial distinction and pleasure! How petty our little grievances ! how small our worries and gossipings and distractions I

Nay 1 on Christmas morning it seems as though we had done with them all, and taken for our own motto, close to onr henrts, " Peace on earth, good will to men." There is a sweet compelling power in kindly thought and good wishes ; it may be powerless to affect our actual material circumstances, but it oan and does steal in % soothing magnetic wave of healirg about the worn spirit and the sad heart. Some of you, dear readers, I seem to know so well through your letters: your troubles, your difficulties, your pleasures have all come home to me in thought as I have read them, and endeared you to me although we are personally such strangers. It Is now out of that inner true sympathy and kindly feeling that I send you my good wishes, and beg you if you have time to think of one outsider on your Christmas morning, to looeen tbe white dove of a kind wish, and bid it fly to Embieline.