The Christmas holidays were drawing near and Barfleur was making due preparations for the celebration of that event. He was a stickler for the proper observance of those things which have national significance and national or international feeling behind them. Whatever joy he might get out of such things, much or little, I am convinced that he was much more concerned lest some one should fail of an appropriate share of happiness than he was about anything else. I liked that in Barfleur. It touched me greatly, and made me feel at times as though I should like to pat him on the head. During all my youth in Indiana and elsewhere I had been fed on that delightful picture, “Christmas in England,” concocted first, I believe (for American consumption, anyhow), by Washington Irving, and from him rehashed for magazines and newspaper purposes until it had come to be romance _ad nauseum_. The boar’s head carried in by the butler of Squire Bracebridge, the ancient peacock pie with the gorgeous tail feathers arranged at one end of the platter and the crested head at the other, the yule log, the mistletoe berries, and the Christmas choristers singing outside of windows and doors of echoing halls, had vaguely stood their ground and as such had rooted themselves in my mind as something connected with ancestral England. I did not exactly anticipate anything of this kind as being a part of present-day England, or of Barfleur’s simple country residence, but, nevertheless, I was in England, and he was making Christmas preparations of one kind or another, and my mind had a perfect right to ramble a little. I think most of all I anticipated another kind of toy from that to which we are accustomed in America.