298 ATTRACTIONS OF WINTER WEATHER 



kinsmen, tenants, and cottagers, of trifling incon- 

 veniences like these, in those Christmas gambols that 



" Could cheer 

 The poor man's heart through half the year." 



Some centuries later, and in " Bracebridge Hall," we 

 see how our old English fashion of keeping Christmas 

 impressed a sympathetic American. The New Eng- 

 landers, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe shows in her <c Poganuc 

 People," have a pretty notion of perpetuating those 

 traditions that were carried over the Atlantic in the 

 Mayflower, although the early Pilgrim Fathers were 

 Puritans. But in a new country, with the go-ahead 

 energy that has grubbed the forest and split the trees 

 into shingles ; with its practically-minded men and its 

 hard utilitarianism, its brand-new buildings and its 

 bald-faced meeting-houses, the associations must be 

 lacking that give the season its solemnity. There are 

 no old squires and old Masters Simon ; no old blue- 

 coated serving-men bred under the roof-tree of the hall ; 

 no old polished mahogany dining-tables, or old family 

 portraits whose burnished frames are brightened up 

 for the occasion with mistletoe and holly-berries ; no 

 cellars of rare old wines and ales that flow at the festal 

 Christmas-tide like water ; above all, no quaint old 

 Norman Church, where the pews of oak and the 

 mediaeval monuments have been as yet undesecrated by 

 the aesthetic restorer. Then Dickens popularised the 

 Bracebridge Halls we will not say that he vulgarised 

 them in his delightful sketches of the Manor Farm. 



