THE HOLLY. 



Flex Aquifo'lium L. 



In northern regions evergreens are not numerous, 

 and the short days of winter are better fitted for 

 festivities round the warm hearth within doors than 

 for industrial occupations in the chill open air. Thus, 

 during the comparatively gloomy reign of winter, the 

 old agricultural festival of the melancholy god Saturn 

 was kept by the Romans with houses decked with 

 boughs, and with free licence of speech and jest for 

 even the slave ; whilst our ancient Teuton ancestors 

 seem to have propitiated those " good people," " the 

 lubber fiend " and other woodland sprites, by offer- 

 ing them warm sheltering boughs around the ingle- 

 nook when their wonted haunts were bare of leaves. 

 Among; the Kelts the unbroken life of " Madre 

 Natura " was symbolised by the evergreen branches 

 of the weird mistletoe, that parasitically decked the 

 boughs of the sacred monarch Oak of the forest, and 

 of the surrounding Apple-groves of Arthur's Avalon 

 when their leaves had fallen. Ancient canons of the 

 Church forbade Christians to deck their houses with 

 evergreens according to these Pagan customs not, 

 at least, at the same times as the heathen ; but it w T as 

 the wise policy of men like Gregory and Augustine to 

 Christianise these rites, although the mistletoe seems 

 to have been too closely associated with the arcana of 

 Druidism ever to receive the same full ecclesiastical 



