eve should make their appearance at the breakfast table. While she was drawing the folds of her pelisse more closely around her form, to guard against a cold that was yet great, though rapidly yielding, in the small enclosure that opened in the rear of the house on a little thicket of low pines, that were springing up where trees of a mightier growth had lately stood, she was surprised at the voice of Mr. Jones, crying aloud—
"Merry Christmas, merry Christmas to you, cousin Bess. Ah, ha! an early riser, I see; but I knew I should steal a march on you. I never was in a house yet, where I did'nt get the first Christmas greeting on every soul in it, man, woman and child; great and small; black, white and yellow. But stop a minute, till I can just slip on my coat; you are about to look at the improvements, I see, which no one can explain so well as I, who planned them all. It will be an hour before 'duke and the Major can sleep off Mrs. Hollister's confounded distillations, and so I'll come down and go with you."
Elizabeth turned, and observed her cousin in his night-cap, with his head out of his bed-room window, where his zeal for pre-eminence, in defiance of the weather, had impelled him to thrust it. She laughed, and promising to wait for his company, she re entered the house, making her appearance again, holding in her hand a packet that was secured by several large and important seals, just in time to meet the gentleman.
"Come, Bessy, come," he cried, drawing one of her arms through his own; "the snow begins to give, but it will bear us yet. Don't you snuff old Pennsylvania in the very air? This is a vile climate, girl; now at sunset last evening it was cold enough to freeze a man's zeal, and that, I can tell you, takes a thermometer near zero for me;
