1830.] [ 133 ] 



MY CHRISTMAS DINNER! 



IT was on the twentieth of December last that I received an invitation 

 from my friend Mr. Phiggins, to dine with him, in Mark-lane, on 

 Christmas-day. I had several reasons for declining this proposition. 

 The first was, that Mr. P. makes it a rule, at all these festivals, to empty 

 the entire contents of his counting-house into his little dining-parlour ; 

 and you consequently sit down to dinner with six white-waistcoated 

 clerks, let loose upon a turkey. The second was, that I am not suffi- 

 ciently well-read in cotton and sugar, to enter with any spirit into the 

 subject of conversation. The third was, and is, that I never drink cape 

 wine. But by far the most prevailing reason remains to be told. I had 

 been anticipating for some days, and was hourly in the hope of receiving, 

 an invitation to spend my Christmas-day in a most irresistible quarter. 

 I was expecting, indeed, the felicity of eating plum-pudding with an 

 angel ; and, on the strength of my imaginary engagement, I returned a 

 polite note to Mr. P., reducing him to the necessity of advertising for 

 another candidate for cape and turkey. 



The twenty-first came. Another invitation to dine with a regiment 

 of roast-beef eaters at Clapham. I declined this also, for the above 

 reason, and for one other, viz. that, on dining there ten Christmas days 

 ago, it was discovered, on sitting down, that one little accompaniment of 

 the roast beef had been entirely overlooked. Would it be believed? 

 but I will not stay to mystify I merely mention the fact. They had 

 forgotten the horse-radish ! 



The next day arrived, and with it a neat epistle, sealed with violet- 

 coloured wax, from Upper Brook- street. " Dine with the ladies at home 

 on Christmas-day." Very tempting, it is true ; but not exactly the letter 

 I was longing for. I began, however, to debate within myself upon the 

 policy of securing this bird in the hand, instead of waiting for the two 

 that were still hopping about the bush, when the consultation was sud- 

 denly brought to a close, by a prophetic view of the portfolio of draw- 

 ings fresh from boarding-school moths and roses on embossed paper; 

 to say nothing of the album, in which I stood engaged to write an elegy 

 on a Java sparrow, that had been a favourite in the family for three 

 days. I rung for gilt-edged, pleaded a world of polite regret, and again 

 declined. 



The twenty-third dawned ; time was getting on rather rapidly ; but 

 no card came. I began to despair of any more invitations, and to repent 

 of my refusals. Breakfast was hardly over, however, when the servant 

 brought up not a letter but an aunt and a brace of cousins from 

 Bayswater. They would listen to no excuse ; consanguinity required 

 me, and Christmas was not my own. Now my cousins keep no albums ; 

 they are really as pretty as cousins can be ; and when violent hands, 

 with white kid gloves, are laid on one, it is sometimes difficult to effect 

 an escape with becoming elegance. I could not, ^however, give up my 

 darling hope of a pleasanter prospect. They fought with me in fifty 

 engagements that I pretended to have made. I shewed them the 

 Court Guide, with ten names obliterated being those of persons who 

 had not asked me to mince-meat and misletoe ; and I ultimately gained 

 my cause by quartering the remains of an infectious fever on the sensi- 

 tive fears of my aunt, and by dividing a rheumatism and a sprained 

 ancle between my sympathetic cousins. 



As soon as they were gone I walked out, sauntering involuntarily in 

 the direction of the only house in which I felt I could spend a " happy" 



