And now through the village she gaily trips,
As the greeting comes from a score of lips:
“A Merry Christmas and bright New Year!”
And the air is heavy with Christmas cheer—
Goose and pudding and beef galore—
And the fires glow bright through each open door
There’s a happy smile upon ev’ry face,
The village is quite a fairy place;
And in every cottage at which they call
The green and holly are on the wall;
And all the family gathered there
Are seated around the Christmas fare.
“How happy they are!” says Baby May,
As she looks at the feast and the feasters gay;
And then there comes to her childish mind
A scene or two of a different kind—
Of weeping women and frowning men,
And nobody seems so happy then!
She had grasped the fact in her childish way
That the poor had “troubles” and “rents” to pay—
That children ailed, and that some men’s wives
Were “nearly worried out of their lives.”
She had heard the gossip, as children do,
And to-day it came back to her mind anew.
She thought of the village of then and now,
And there came a cloud on her baby brow;
She knew there was sorrow where now was mirth,
And she whispered, “Mamma, when He made the earth,
What a pity it was God did not say,
‘Let it be always Christmas Day’!”
Sanitation at Sea.
HAVE sailed o’er the ocean to spots far away,
I’ve also done “Margate and back” in the day;
I have spent the long nights upon deck in a storm,
And stood by the funnel to keep myself warm;
And when I’ve been poorly as poorly can be,
I have sighed for some slight “sanitation at sea.”
I have been in the cabin where sufferers lay
In an atmosphere fitted a nigger to slay,
I have slept in a bunk where the air was so foul
That I woke in the morn with an agonized howl,
And I’ve staggered upstairs crying, “Oh, dearie me!
Why will they ignore ‘sanitation at sea’?”
By the smell of the engine, the dirt on the deck,
By the stairs you descend at the risk of your neck,
By the cabin whose odour is stuffy and stale,
By the dirty old tub which is known as “the Mail,”
By the horrors from which scarce a vessel is free,
We’d welcome the least “sanitation at sea.”