But the doctor's sermon had the effect to draw the lines as to keeping Christmas up to the tightest brace. The academy teacher took occasion on Monday to remark to his scholars how he had never thought of such a thing as suspending school for Christmas holidays, and those of the pupils who, belonging to Episcopal families, had gone on Christmas Day to church were informed that marks for absence and non-performance of lessons would stand against them, no matter what excuses they might bring from parents. As to Christmas holidays--the giving up to amusement a week, from Christmas to New Year's--he spoke of it as a popish enormity not to be mentioned or even thought of in God-fearing New England, which abhorred a holiday as much as nature abhors a vacuum. Those parents whose children had been drawn in to attend these seductive festivities were anxiously admonished by their elders in homilies from the text, "Surely, in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird." For example, witness one scene. It is Sunday evening, and the bright snapping fire lights up the great kitchen chimney where the widow Jones is sitting by the stand with her great Bible before her. A thin, weary, kindly old face is hers, with as many lines in it as Denner's celebrated picture of the old woman. Everything about her, to her angular figure and her thin bony hands, bore witness to the unsparing work that had been laid upon every hour and moment of her life. Even now the thin hands that rested on the Bible twitched at times mechanically as if even in the blessed rest of Sunday evening she felt the touch of the omnipresent knitting needles. On the settle beside the fire, half stretched out, lounges Hiel, her youngest born son and the prop of her old age; for all others have gone hither and thither seeking their future in the world. Hiel has been comforting her heart by the heartiest praises of the minister's sermon that day. "I tell you what, Mother, them 'Piscopals got pitched into lively, now; the Doctor pursued 'em 'even unto Shur,' as the Scriptur' says." "Yis; and, Hiel, I hope you won't be seen goin' to the 'Piscopal meetings no more. I felt reely consarned, after I heard the sarmon, to think of your bein' in to that air 'lumination." "Oh laws, Mother, I jest _hed_ to go to see to things. Things hez to be seen to; there was the Doctor's boys right up in the front slips, and little Dolly there rolled up like a rabbit down there under them spruces. I had to take her home. I expect it's what waked up the Doctor so, what I said to him." "Wal, Hiel, mebbe it was all fer the best; but I hope you'll let it alone now. And I heard you was a settin' up with Nabby Higgins the other evening; was you?" A curious expression passed over Hiel's droll handsome face, and he drew his knife from his pocket and began reflectively to shave a bit of shingle.