THE HOLLY. 
Tlee Aquifo'lium L. 
Ty 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 was 
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 
22 9 
