Some Christmas Stories (Broché)

" I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers ; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves ; and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being wound up) dangling from innumerable twigs ; there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping ; there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men-and no wonder, for their heads took off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plums ; there were fiddles and drums ; there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes, sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes ; there were trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold and jewels ; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices ; there were guns, swords, and banners ; there were witches standing in enchanted rings of pasteboard, to tell fortunes ; there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle- cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation-cards, bouquet-holders ; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf ; imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises ; in short, as a pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend, "There was everything, and more.
" This motley collection of odd objects, clustering on the tree like magic fruit, and flashing back the bright looks directed towards it from every side-some of the diamond-eyes admiring it were hardly on a level with the table, and a few were languishing in timid wonder on the bosoms of pretty mothers, aunts, and nurses-made a lively realisation of the fancies of childhood ; and set me thinking how all the trees that grow and all the things that come into existence on the earth, have their wild adornments at that well- remembered time".