But, to return from this unnecessary digression, I am reminded that the charioteer of the patient year has brought round the holiday time. It has been a growing year, as most years are. It is very pleasant to see how the shrubs in our little patch of ground widen and thicken and bloom at the right time, and to know that the great trees have added a laver to their trunks. To be sure, our garden, --which I planted under Polly's directions, with seeds that must have been patented, and I forgot to buy the right of, for they are mostly still waiting the final resurrection,--gave evidence that it shared in the misfortune of the Fall, and was never an Eden from which one would have required to have been driven. It was the easiest garden to keep the neighbor's pigs and hens out of I ever saw. If its increase was small its temptations were smaller, and that is no little recommendation in this world of temptations. But, as a general thing, everything has grown, except our house. That little cottage, over which Polly presides with grace enough to adorn a palace, is still small outside and smaller inside; and if it has an air of comfort and of neatness, and its rooms are cozy and sunny by day and cheerful by night, and it is bursting with books, and not unattractive with modest pictures on the walls, which we think do well enough until my uncle--(but never mind my uncle, now),--and if, in the long winter evenings, when the largest lamp is lit, and the chestnuts glow in embers, and the kid turns on the spit, and the house-plants are green and flowering, and the ivy glistens in the firelight, and Polly sits with that contented, far-away look in her eyes that I like to see, her fingers busy upon one of those cruel mysteries which have delighted the sex since Penelope, and I read in one of my fascinating law-books, or perhaps regale ourselves with a taste of Montaigne,--if all this is true, there are times when the cottage seems small; though I can never find that Polly thinks so, except when she sometimes says that she does not know where she should bestow her uncle in it, if he should suddenly come back from India. There it is, again. I sometimes think that my wife believes her uncle in India to be as large as two ordinary men; and if her ideas of him are any gauge of the reality, there is no place in the town large enough for him except the Town Hall. She probably expects him to come with his bungalow, and his sedan, and his palanquin, and his elephants, and his retinue of servants, and his principalities, and his powers, and his ha--(no, not that), and his chowchow, and his--I scarcely know what besides. Christmas eve was a shiny cold night, a creaking cold night, a placid, calm, swingeing cold night.