“It seems so strange,” said Ellen Terry, “to play on Christmas Day; that, to me, makes the time wholly unlike Christmas. On the other hand, there is the snow, and we shall have an English Christmas pudding,—I brought it from home, and my mother made it.”
“Well done; bless her heart!” said Irving; “but I have played before on Christmas Day. They open the theatres in Scotland on Christmas Day. They don’t pay much attention, I am told, to church festivals in Boston and New England; but one would have expected it in the South, where they are observing the social character of Christmas, I learn, more and more every year; and not alone to the snow, but to that fact, I am told, we are to attribute the small houses we had last night and to-night.”
“Small for America and for us,” chimed in Loveday; “but what we should, after our experience, call bad business here would be very good in England.”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Irving; “but here’s holly and mistletoe,—where did they come from?”
He was looking at a very English decoration that swung from the chandelier.
“From London, with the pudding,” said Miss Terry.
The colored attendants took great interest in our celebration of the festival. If they could have put their thoughts into words they would probably have expressed surprise that artists of whom they had heard so much could entertain each other in so simple a fashion.
When the pudding came on the table it was not lighted.
“Who has had charge of this affair?” Irving asked, looking slyly at everybody but Stoker.
“I have,” said the usual delinquent.