for both winy and gentler have they become by this process. Our ancestors gave them the affectionate name of 'lamb's wool;' for we cannot help thinking, in spite of what is intimated by one of our authorities, that this term applied more particularly to the apples and not so much to the bowl altogether; though if it did, it shows how indispensably necessary to it they were considered." With all deference to Mr. Leigh Hunt's pleasant and graceful trifling, lamb's wool was the title given to the composition itself, no doubt on account of the delicate and harmonious qualities, to which the apples contribute their share. Our readers will find an account of the alleged origin of this annual practice in a curious description of an old wassail-bowl, carved upon the oaken beam that supported a chimney-piece in an old mansion in Kent, which description is copied by Hone into his "Every-Day Book," from the "Antiquarian Repertory." In the halls of our ancestors, this bowl was introduced with the inspiring cry of "wassail," three times repeated, and immediately answered by a song from the chaplain. We hope our readers will sing to the wassail-bowl this Christmas-tide. We find that in some parts of Ireland and in Germany, and probably in districts of England, too, Christmas Eve is treated as a night of omens, and that practices exist for gathering its auguries having a resemblance to those of our northern neighbors at Halloween. Many beautiful, and some solemn superstitions belong to this night and the following morning. It is stated by Sir Walter Scott, in one of his notes to "Marmion," to be an article of popular faith, "that they who are born on Christmas or Good Friday have the power of seeing spirits, and even of commanding them;" and he adds that "the Spaniards imputed the haggard and downcast looks of their Philip II. to the disagreeable visions to which this privilege subjected him." Among the finest superstitions of the night may be mentioned that which is alluded to by Shakspeare in the lines which we have placed as the epigraph to the present chapter. It is a consequence or application of that very ancient and popular belief which assigns the night for the wanderings of spirits, and supposes them, at the crowing of "the cock, that is the trumpet to the morn," to start "like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons," and betake themselves to flight. Here again, as in so many cases of vulgar superstition, a sort of mental metonymy has taken place; and the crowing of the cock, which in the early stage of the belief was imagined to be the signal for the departure of evil spirits, only _because_ it announced the morning, is, in the further stage which we are examining, held to be a sound _in itself_ intolerable to these shadowy beings. Accordingly it is supposed that on the eve of Christmas "the bird of dawning singeth all night long," to scare away all evil things from infesting the hallowed hours:--