steaming bowl, the blazing log, the traditional games. But was not
the modern world, with its almost avowed bias towards materialism, too
little apt to think of Christmas as also a time for meditation, for
taking stock, as it were, of the things of the soul? Percy had heard
that in London nowadays there was a class of people who sate down
to their Christmas dinners in public hotels. He did not condemn this
practice. He never condemned a thing, but wondered, rather, whether
it were right, and could not help feeling that somehow it was not.
In the course of his rare visits to London he had more than once
been inside of one of the large new hotels that had sprung up--these
"great caravanseries," as he described them in a letter to an
old school-fellow who had been engaged for many years in Chinese
mission work. And it seemed to him that the true spirit of Christmas
could hardly be acclimatised in such places, but found its proper
resting-place in quiet, detached homes, where were gathered together
only those connected with one another by ties of kinship, or of long
and tested friendship.

He sometimes blamed himself for having tended more and more, as the
quiet, peaceful, tranquil years went by, to absent himself from even
those small domestic gatherings. And yet, might it not be that his
instinct for solitude at this season was a right instinct, at least
for him, and that to run counter to it would be in some degree
unacceptable to the Power that fashioned us? Thus he allowed himself
to go, as it were, his own way. After morning service, he sate down
to his Christmas fare alone, and then, when the simple meal was over,
would sit and think in his accustomed chair, falling perhaps into
one of those quiet dozes from which, because they seemed to be so
natural a result, so seemly a consummation, of his thoughts, he
did not regularly abstain. Later, he sallied forth, with a sense