one's mother-country, yet the necessity for much cookery at that time involves such severe conflict with the weather that no one thinks of prolonging the festivity; indeed I should much doubt whether there are many persons, born and reared in the colony, who have ever heard of Twelfth Day. Christmas Day itself was celebrated with all due religious observance and with the meeting together of friends, and though the dressing of the church beforehand was a real labour in such a temperature, volunteers for the work were never lacking. But the one great day seemed to constitute the whole of Christmastide.
On the occurrence of the first Christmas that we spent "over the hills," I felt as if brought to a dead halt in all my previous notions of promoting the happiness and comfort of the poor. My thoughts had been running upon the last time that we had witnessed that festival in our old home parish—the dole of beef distributed to every family—the old women coming to the house through the sleet on St. Thomas's Day to beg for their accustomed shillings—"going Thomasing," as they called it—the waits coming outside our windows at twelve o'clock on Christmas Eve, a chair being especially carried for the accommodation of the double-bass—my mind had been fixed on such recollections as these, and there seemed to be something unnatural in being in a country where neither blankets nor flannel would be seasonable gifts, and where "Thomas" was the tutelary saint not of the shortest day but of Midsummer. By the time, however, that we had lived five years in the colony we had learned to think an excessive degree of heat at Christ-
