Christmas in England! The day broke clear and bright, and there we all were. It was not cold, and as is usual, there was little if any wind. I remember looking out of my window down into the valley toward Bridgely, and admiring the green rime upon the trees, the clustered chimneys of a group of farmers’ and working-men’s cottages, the low sagging roofs of red tile or thatch, and the small window panes that always somehow suggest a homey simplicity that I can scarcely resist. The English milkmaid of fiction, the simple cottages, the ordered hierarchy of farmers are, willy nilly, fixtures in my mind. I cannot get them out. First then, came a breakfast in our best bibs and tuckers, for were we not to depart immediately afterwards to hear an English Christmas service? Imagine Barfleur--the pride of Piccadilly,--marching solemnly off at the head of his family to an old, gray abbey church. As the French say, “I smile.” We all sat around and had our heavy English breakfast,--tea, and, to my comfort and delight, “Mr. Jones’s sausages.” Barfleur had secured a string of them from somewhere. “Think of it,” commented Berenice sardonically. “‘Mr. Jones’s sausages’ for breakfast. Aren’t they comic! Do you like them?” “I most assuredly do.” “And do you eat them every day in A-máy-reeka?” queried Charles Gerard with a touch of latent jesting in his voice. “When I can afford them, yes.” “They’re quite small, aren’t they?” commented five-year-old James Herbert. “Precisely,” I replied, unabashed by this fire of inquiry. “That’s their charm.” The church that we visited was one of those semi-ancient abbey affairs, done in good English Gothic, with a touch of Tudor here and there, and was located outside the village of Bridgely Level two or three miles from Barfleur’s home. I recall with simple pleasure the smug, self-righteous, Sunday-go-to-meeting air with which we all set forth, crossing homey fields via diagonal paths, passing through stiles and along streams and country roads, by demure little cottages that left one breathless with delight. I wish truly that England could be put under glass and retained as a perfect specimen of unconscious, rural poetry--the south of England. The pots and pans outside the kitchen doorways! The simple stoop, ornamented with clambering vines! The reddish-green sagging roofs with their clustered cylindrical chimneypots! When we came to the top of a hill we could see the church in the valley below, nestling beside one bank of the Thames which wound here and there in delightful S’s. A square tower, as I recall, rose quaintly out of a surrounding square of trees, grass, grave-stones and box-hedge.