The holidays were at hand. Thanksgiving was Aunt Prudence’s great annual festival, her Feast of Tabernacles; she made little account of Christmas, which, she told Peter, was a mere “relic of the Pope and the Dragon,” and which he associated with an old picture in the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Watch Night was the great annual occasion of the old Bristol Methodists. It took place on New Year’s Eve, when a great assembly used to meet to sing the old Wesleyan Watch Night hymns, written by Wesley for the Old London Foundry, and to watch “the old year out and the new year in.” The services of the Presiding Elder were sometimes secured for this memorable night, and if so, a “Love Feast” was held, and a multitude told their experiences, amid triumphant responses, ecstatic refrains, and sometimes strange exhibitions of trance, or of “losing one’s strength,” as the old phenomena were called. Christmas was the Episcopal festival, and the Episcopal Church in Bristol was unlike any other at that time. It followed the revival methods of Whitefield and Lady Huntingdon. Christmas Eve was an occasion of universal charity. The poor were the guests of the church, and were entertained like princes. Peter well understood all these festivals, and he resolved to attend them all,—the old Orthodox church’s Thanksgiving, the Episcopal festival, and the Methodists’ solemn jubilee on New Year’s Eve. There was nothing sectarian about him. It was also his intention not to disturb the mind of Aunt Prudence about these matters,—the easy hall window would make it unnecessary. [Illustration: CITY HALL.] Thanksgiving passed—it fell late this year; December came in mildly, as though the bright days were loath to go. The stillness before the winter storms filled the air. The withered grasses were silent now, without the voice of insect or bird. A white gull sometimes cleaved the still gray air, and the wild cry of the shore birds was sometimes heard. The nights were silvery and cold. The Mount Hope Bay and the Pocassett Hills in the frosty moonlight recalled the silence and melancholy fate of that ancient race which slumbered in the browned fields, Pometacom’s cliff and spring. The night air seemed peopled with shadows of painted chiefs and spectral armies forever gone. The river weeds were dead, and encased in a thin sheet of ice in the early mornings. Brown leaves still hung on the oaks, and red leaves of ivy on the long walls. Husking was over, and the yellow cones of the stalks of corn fodder glimmered on every farm. The fishing-boats were hauled upon the shore; everything—the sky, the blue bay, the fields, the working-men—seemed waiting for the coming of winter. The mild days grew shorter and shorter; the tall candles burned lower and lower each evening; the nights were glorious, and Christmas Eve came, rung in by the resonant bell of good St. Michael’s.