lowings of the respective houses from feasting together whenever occasion offered.) But she had left it to this night of the concert to decide whether it should be the Stanhopes or the Bertrams whom she asked to join us on Christmaseve. Chance had made her sit next the Stanhopes, and she had invited them.

My uncle, however, was not nearly so well versed in the Stanhope-Bertram question. If he had heard of any family quarrel at all he had certainly never bestowed any thought on it. He was not a quarrelling man himself, and could never have been made to think-good, easy soul -that other people were seriously in earnest in disliking each other even with good occasion; much less could he have realized the existence of hostile feeling on grounds that had become quite traditional. So, when Percy escorted Miss Grace Bertram to her carriage, my uncle, leaving my aunt with the Stanhopes, stepped across with him to have five minutes' confidential talk with old Mr. Bertram on the merits of short horns and mangolds. And as Mr. Bertram's voice, like my uncle's, seemed to come huskily from beneath many dinners, perhaps it was that which suggested to my uncle the idea of pressing him to come and put one more dinner on the top of it at Woodfield Manor on Christmas-eve. Thus, while my aunt was receiving the promises of the Stanhopes that they would join in our festivity, my uncle had got from Mr. Bertram an assurance that he also would come, and bring with him Mrs. Bertram, Miss Grace, and his son Mr. Wingwood.

And at our breakfast next morning all this came out.

I wish, Emily,' said my aunt to me, that you would write notes to the Stanhopes, to remind them of their promise to come up on Christmas-eve.'

'And she might as well write to the Bertrams too,' said my uncle, 'if so much fuss is necessary.

'Impossible!' exclaimed my aunt; 'why, the Stanhopes have never been under the same house-roof with the Bertrams in their lives.'

'Time they were, then; and, at any rate, Mr. Bertram promised me last night that they would all come.'

I declare my aunt turned quite pale with dismay. But you never,' she said-'you never told him that the Stanhopes were coming! If you must ask him at all, why didn't you tell him that?'

'Because, my dear,' said he-because I never knew, and because I thought

Thought!' said she -' you thought! and a very pretty business you have made of your thinking. We shall have a fight in the dining-room, a scene in the drawing-room, and a paragraph in the county newspapers!'

My uncle whistled the tune of the 'Cannibal Islands,' as he always does when storms are imminent, and he had got at least half a dozen times through it before my aunt had cooled down far enough to admit, as she did at last, that there was now nothing for it but sending both the sets of notes, and leaving the result to fortune and good management.

Our only hope was that one or other of the belligerents would hear that both were invited, and would send an excuse for staying away. But Monday came, and no such way out of the dilemma opened to us. In fact the secret seemed to be with us. Every one knew that the Stanhopes were coming, but no one had named it to the Bertrams; and the Bertrams, for their part, did not seem to have spoken of their intended visit to any one.

The only one who seemed to enjoy the prospect of the coming encounter was Percy. He and I were busy as bees all Monday decorating the house with holly and laurel. He had got a mistletoe of such an immense size that he declared the apple-tree must have grown on it, as it could never have grown on any apple-tree. He was in positive alarm lest any denouement should take place to keep away either Miss Grace or Miss Aimée, for he declared he meant to go through his duets again with them. In short, he was the only

one who made light of our perplexity.

As for my aunt, when dinner-time drew near, I believe she would have been glad of any accident, short of burning the house down, by which dinner might have been destroyed and she furnished with a decent excuse for countermanding her invitations. Every dish, however, was done to a turn. Every gravy, every sauce, every jelly, every pudding was perfect. Everything, in fact, went provokingly well. Then the guests themselves began to arrive. The Stanhopes came early; and my aunt said to me, it really made matters worse to see them so goodtempered and so thoroughly agreeable. 'They will be so different by-and-by,' she said; it seems quite a pity. If only they had been a little bit cold and disagreeable to commence with, you see, they would not seem to have so far to fall.'

But the Stanhopes evidently seemed as if they would not make themselves unpleasant to oblige anybody. Then came the Mertons, and the Fletchers, friends of theirs, all brimming over with goodwill and Christmas feeling. Then came the Emerys, the Falconers, and the Pattiesons, all seeming as if they tried to look more cheerful than those who had come before them. And last of all, simultaneously with an overpowering odour of roast turkey and sausages, in came my uncle with all four of the Bertrams, whom he introduced with one grand flourish to all the guests at once, led them to the top of the table, and before either they or the Stanhopes had become at all alive to their position, these respectable families found themselves seated face to face, one on the right hand and the other on the left of their host.

Dinner had been pronounced to be servi' that minute. For one instant a flush passed over the faces of the two men, who had hardly ever met before, or ever thought of each other but with the stinging sense of ancient grudge. In an instant they instinctively pushed back their chairs and rose to their feet. Their families rose with them.

Before a word could be spoken, my uncle rose too, and my aunt rose at the other end of the table. Every guest rose on his feet and leaned forward that he might catch the angry words that were expected. With admirable presence of mind my uncle stretched out his hand and motioned for silence. Then he said solemnly, 'O Lord, who givest us all good gifts in due season, add thy blessing to these mercies, and help us to partake of them with love to thee and love to each other, in remembrance of that Saviour who was born at Christmas time.' And we all sat down as if we had risen merely to ask this blessing, and we breathed with a sense of sudden relief, and my uncle said, 'What shall I help you to, Mr. Stanhope?' And Mr. Stanhope took, if I remember rightly, a little of the wing, with a small slice of the breast. And Mr. Bertram took whatever selection he thought best, and so indeed did all of us. And my uncle took wine with Mr. Stanhope (for we are yet old-fashioned enough in Woodfield to take wine with each other). And he took wine with Mr. Bertram. And I am afraid I must confess that he took wine severally with every one at the table. And then he took wine with Mr. Stanhope and Mr. Bertram conjointly in a triangular way, and then with the whole table in an aggregate capacity, and, in short, everybody took wine with everybody else, and before dinner was over, Mr. Bertram and Mr. Stanhope had been seen actually to jingle glasses with each other across the table. Mr. Wingwood Bertram had said to Mr. Mark Stanhope (a young gentleman whom I have not yet introduced to you, because he is of no consequence), 'Come then, let's shake hands on it,' and had shaken hands with him across the table so often that at last he had abbreviated the invitation to 'Come,' which Mark (that is, Mr. Mark) always understood as a request for the loan of his hand, and that he would drink wine with Mr. Wingwood. I even fancy that I saw Miss Grace and Miss Aimée nodding to each other, and sipping

at least a full teaspoonful of sherry apiece: but I should be sorry to make this assertion positively without some other confirmation.

At any rate, before dinner was over, everybody seemed to feel that without a word of explanation the great Stanhope-Bertram feud had ceased to exist, and that matters were henceforth to stand on a very different footing between the two families. I think, therefore, that the blessing which Sancho Panza invoked upon the man who first invented sleep,' is due also to the man who first invented dinners, whereby are often, as in this instance, covered a multitude of offences, and many virtues brought to light that lay invisible.

In fact, when we ladies came in again from the drawing-room to make tea, it seemed to me that Mr. Stanhope and Mr. Bertram had discovered so many virtues in each other that you would have taken them for the most attached friends in the room.

Tea, I need hardly say, was but a brief affair, for Percy had been tormenting me in a most abominable way to hurry on the games which were to follow it. It was evident, in fact, that he had been conspiring to put the old people into the background, and let us young folks monopolize the rest of the evening.

To begin with, we tried charades, our first attempt being to perform a mystery in three acts, which, being interpreted, was to signify the word co-nun-drum. In the first act Percy was the managing partner of a puffing shop in the haberdashery line, and in conversation with other acting partners he enlarged on the fact that he was in co with them. The idea was certainly not a brilliant one, but it is surprising how the most hopeless dulness is pardoned amongst goodhumoured people. At any rate this was liberally allowed to pass muster as a symbolical representation of the first syllable of our word. Then in act the second, Percy again came in as a father confessor investing Miss Grace Bertram with the veil, and there was much talk

of the fair nun and of the mistake she was making. Here again none of us knew that our ceremony was in the slightest degree like the real ceremony which we travestied; but as none of the lookers-on were wise enough to correct us, we passed muster again. But when the inevitable Mr. Percy, in act the third, came in once more with a drum at the head of what he called a regiment, public opinion could tolerate him no longer; and as everybody had been talking openly of our word from the beginning of the second act, we drummed out the drummer himself with many indignities, and pronounced charades to be intolerably stupid. It remained a joke, however, for the rest of the evening, that Percy maintained his position as father confessor to Miss Grace long after the drama ought to have been finished.

After charades Mrs. Bertram proposed proverbs,' as an amusement peculiarly suited to young people of such limited understandings as ours evidently were. And after we had tried a proverb, we had, 'How, when, and where?' and after that some one proposed the still more imbecile employment of loving our loves with all the letters of the alphabet, whereupon the young gentlemen, who had been for some time showing signs of mutiny, broke into open revolt, declaring that it was so long since they were babies, that they had entirely forgotten their alphabets; that it was a shame to expect any one to play such games so long after he had put away his primer, and that, in short, unless they had something with forfeits in it, they did not see what was the use of the mistletoe, and they had better begin dancing at

once.

In this way, I blush to confess, we were persuaded, without much resistance, to commence a game at trencher, involving no end of romping and unladylike behaviour. Miss Stanhope tried the longest to maintain her dignity; but for any young lady to maintain dignity, when she is liable at every minute to be called on to prevent a spinning trencher from falling, or to leave her seat and

frantically rush to that vacated by some one else, is simply impossible. Miss Stanhope gave it up at last, and played her part as an amiable, foolish creature, with the rest of

us.

But I must and do say that the way in which Percy kept Miss Bertram running after that trencher, and the unfair expedients he had for preventing her from getting a chair when seats had to be changed was most scandalous. When he called her name-and that was simply every time he had the chance of calling anybody-he never gave the trencher a fair, honest spin, but merely set it on its edge, and tipped it over, so that Miss Bertram had no chance of catching it. The consequence was that in a very few minutes she had parted with her bracelets, her scent-bottle, her scissors, her thimble, her gloves, and her needle-case, and was declared to be bankrupt and out of the game until the time came for redeeming these treasures. After which it was surprising to see how Mr. Percy himself was somehow always being called on for forfeits, too, and very speedily had to be marched off to the corner where Miss Bertram had gone before, and where, I have no doubt, she told him her mind very freely.

They were not left to their quarrels long, however, before, my aunt's work-basket being full of forfeits, it was decided that we should begin to redeem them. So Miss Stanhope was appointed to serve them out, and Mr. Wingwood Bertram was blindfolded and placed on his knees before her to decree the penances which had to be gone through in each instance for the release of the properties.

And certainly, to see Mr. Wingwood on his knees before Miss Stanhope, with his face nestled in her lap, and to see the way in which Miss Stanhope boxed his ears when she found that he had got a peephole for one eye, and that on the strength of information thus fraudulently gained he was proposing to redeem one of his own forfeits by taking her under the mistletoe,-to see this, I say, must have been a

sight to astonish their parents. And to see how Mr. Wingwood's only idea of redeeming a forfeit was, that he should set some one to take a liberty with some one else; and to hear what a preposterous amount Percy said there was to pay on a letter which he pretended to bring for Miss Bertram, and the wrangling which they had outside the door (for the postman was never admitted into the room) about the change' which he said he had to give her; then to see the pitiful face of Mr. Wingwood when a letter which Miss Stanhope had brought for him was declared to be prepaid, and how he persisted in giving her 'change' out of nothing,-to see and to hear all this was a caution to all respectable parents not to let their children play trencher again on light provo

cation.

It came to an end at last, however, and a call was raised to clear the room for a dance. Then in came Jacob, the coachman, who combines a knowledge of fiddling with a knowledge of horseflesh, and with him as sole orchestra we devoted ourselves to reels, and polkas, schottisches, lancers, and mazurkas, till human legs could trip it no longer, save in one grand old country dance, on which we expended all the energy we had left. My aunt and uncle were top couple; then came Mr. Stanhope and Mrs. Bertram; then Mr. Bertram and Mrs. Stanhope; then we young people, as seemed good to us. There were twenty couples at the least, although my talk in this story has been only of a few. And all of us were determined to show ourselves people who could dance, and did dance, without any pretence in the matter. And when it was all over, we were content to hear people talk of going home, without being indignant at the suggestion; and so, with friendly shakings of the hand, and happy laughter, our friends departed, and left us to our own bright yule-logs and our own wellpleased thoughts.