It is a keen experience of wayfarers that a north-easterly, unlike a south-easterly wind, seldom drops at evenfall; and therefore should it be a leading principle in the ethics of all wise innkeepers to leave a blind or two up when the rasping demon is abroad at sundown. For what an acute accent on numbness is that flash from a ruddy window! What an invitation in it and a suggestion of the purple bead on a glass of mulled wine! A moment before, life had blown chill and astringent--a hateful, brassy, and unprofitable affair, whose every vile sensation seemed concentrated in the tips of the ears. Now its interests have gleefully enlarged. There grows and blooms an image of a richly-bought experience of a sanded tap-room; of schools of sleek glasses on shelves, their glossy depths, in the red stillness of the fire-glow, slumberous with ruby, as if a memory of the good warm stuff they had known yet coloured all their dreams; of sturdy kegs, each with an amber drop tremulous on the nozzle of its tap, and its sides pregnant with jollity; of bowls of sugar; of pimpled lemons; of the comfortable purr of a kettle on the hob; of the essence of all of these rising in a fragrant steam that shall moisten the very drought of the heart and send it singing on its way. Betty Pollack, the daughter and granddaughter of innkeepers, had the right comfortable instinct in this respect; and when the cry of the wind came under the door-sill like a wolf’s howl, she knew the demon flew from the north-east, and would order her plans accordingly. Then, at fall of dark, from the unblinded tap-window of the “First Inn,” the zealous lamp-glow would flood the road and wash the trunks of the trees on the opposite side; till any one passing into that lighthouse radiance--wherein the whipped leaves were whirled like flakes of umber foam--would be as morally certain to gravitate towards the tavern-door as if he were come within the charmed circle about a witch’s lair. And a very alluring witch was Betty--wholesome as white bread, and tempered with fragrance like the warm stroking bouquet of delectable claret. In winter she was still like the garden scabious, which of all flowers smells most of honey, and whose blossoms are little beds of love for troubadour bees. It was ten o’clock of a wintry night, and Betty sang in her bar. She lifted up her sweet voice because she was alone; for the icy wind wailed without, and Hodge had filled up betimes and stumped off to his trundle-bed, and custom was scant. Grandfather was snoring in his blankets this half-hour; Jim hard by nodded against his lanthorn in the kitchen, and Betty thought of shutting up and seeking slumber of her own warm pillow. She moved to and fro, putting little sprigs of Christmas in glasses, bottles, and up in odd places of the bar. For Yule was but a week to come, and Betty was staunch to tradition.