Christmas-day at Pevenshall was very much like every other day. There was perhaps a little more eating and drinking than usual in the servants' hall, where the male portion of the assembly seemed to consider the inordinate consumption of strong drinks and warm spiced beverages indispensable to the due celebration of the season. A friendly rubber and a tankard of mulled port beguiled the cheerful evening in the housekeeper's room, while the mirth of the occasion was promoted by the witticisms of a linen-draper's assistant who was paying his addresses to Miss Evershed's maid, and had come from the market-town to spend his Christmas evening in the society of his betrothed. In these inferior regions the monster plum-pudding of the traditional Christmas appeared in a blaze of spirituous splendour at the three o'clock dinner, and reappeared in cold substantiality upon the loaded supper-table. Here there were glistening holly-berries, and the frail waxen mistletoe, with all the giggling and scuffling provoked by the magic bough; here, among Mr. Lobyer's well-fed retainers, jolly King Christmas deigned to show his honest rubicund visage in all its legendary geniality. But at Mr. Lobyer's dinner-table jolly King Christmas was a poor creature, represented in one of the later courses by a turkey that was ignominiously carved by an under butler upon the great oak sideboard, and which was handed about in small modicums, to be contemptuously rejected by surfeited diners who had just been regaled with a course of spring ducklings and early green peas at half a guinea a spoonful, and introducing himself furtively at the fag end of the banquet under cover of a small mould of some black compound, which the attendant offering it explained in a low voice as "plum-pudding." In Mr. Lobyer's drawing-room it might have been midsummer; for the fires at each end of the spacious chamber were hidden by great Parian screens, through which the red blaze shed only a rosy glow, like the low sunlight in a summer evening sky; and the atmosphere was odorous with the scent of roses and myrtles, hyacinth and myosotis, blooming in _jardinières_ of ormolu and buhl, or fading in tall slender vases of fragile glass. The possessor of a million of money is the earthly incarnation of Zeus. At his bidding the summer fruits ripen at Christmas time; for his pleasure the nipping winter becomes a "time of roses." It is not to be expected, therefore, that the millionaire should put himself out of the way, because the common herd choose to be joyful; or that he should embrace dowagers under a vulgar mistletoe bough, and burn his fingers in the extraction of indigestible raisins from a dish of blazing spirits.