These differences cannot be helped, and indeed they should be a source of pleasure to all, as I said before, and undoubtedly would be were family feeling cultivated among us in a manner that it certainly is not in most English homes. Therefore all these ceremonies should be made an occasion for family parties, and at Christmas time, too, all should meet who can, at the house of the eldest of the family, should the father and mother be unable to have their gathering or be dead, as is so often the case; and there should be regular preparations for enjoyment, a ‘surprise’ (my annual surprise considerably shortens my life), a Christmas tree, games, and a good supper, all mapped out just as if we expected the greatest strangers and wished to impress them with our forms of hospitality. Take rather more pains about the arrangements and details of a family party than any other; I am quite sure that if you do you will be amply rewarded. And now to think about weddings and marriages, generally a most enthralling subject to fathers and mothers when the children have grown up and they begin to contemplate the idea of their leaving the fireside for homes of their own, when begins, I think, the most difficult period of our life, and when we cannot be too careful whom we admit to our houses, the while we must not be unduly fussy, else we spoil our children’s chance of happiness, and make them miserably anxious for themselves and their possible fate--a fate I would postpone for ever if I had my way, for who can calmly contemplate passing on one’s daughter to another’s care, I wonder? while one’s possible daughters-in-law can never be anything, I fear, save successful rivals to the throne one occupies in one’s boys’ hearts.