Pursue you night and morrow,
If e’er you hoped, hope now!
Take heart!—Uncloud your faces.
And join in our embraces
Under the Holly Bough!”
There is no use in grieving:—there is no sense in quarrelling:—there is no advantage in grumbling. People sacrifice both good health and good looks by constant querulousness. Suppose it is a “cold” Christmas, or a “damp” Christmas, or a “green” Christmas, or an “east-windy” Christmas, or an altogether meteorologically disagreeable Christmas. Well, what then? All the peevishness in the world will not alter it. Some of you who don’t like it will make for Egypt or the Riviera. Much good may it do you! An Arab smell, and the “fleecing” of Cairene hotel proprietors are doubtful additions to Christmas pleasure—and the raucous cry of the croupier at Monte Carlo—“Faites vos jeux, Messieurs et Mesdames!” is scarcely worth crossing the Channel to hear. Perhaps, however, it may be a satisfaction to some folks to spend their surplus cash in “furrin parts” rather than at home? If this should be the case, it will be an equal satisfaction to me to politely intimate that I consider such persons unworthy of their own matchless country. The much abused “English climate” is good enough for anybody. Every sort of “temperature” can be obtained in these favoured British Isles. If warmth, and freedom from east winds be required, it can be obtained at Penzance, Newquay, or Tenby—or better still on the lovely Irish coast at Parknasilla, where palms and tropical trees grow to perfection all winter in the open. Certainly there is no “gambling-hell” there;—there are only warm Irish hearts waiting for sympathy and comprehension, and I venture to think they merit as much good cash spent among them for their benefit as is wasted on the French, who, given the opportunity, abuse their English patrons more outrageously than any wild-headed, big-hearted Irish “agitator” that ever lived. I must confess I have no sympathy with the restless, nervous swarms of semi-lunatics ever “on the go” in search of “change,” who turn their backs on Imperial Britain at the first breath of its winter, which, taken on the whole, is a much more healthy winter than other countries are blessed with. And an “old English Yule” kept in the old English manner is not to be despised. Try it, all you who are not going abroad—you who are not only content, but glad and proud to remain in this
“Earth of Majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself;
. . . This little world,