'Surely 'tisn't an empty house, as befell us in the year thirty-nine and forty-three!" said old Dewy, with much disappointment.
'Perhaps she's jist come from some noble city, and sneers at our doings,' the tranter whispered.
"Od rabbit her!' said Mr. Penny, with an annihilating look at a corner of the school chimney, 'I don't quite stomach her, if this is it. Your plain music well done is as worthy as your other sort done bad, a' b'lieve souls; so say I.'
'Forty breaths, and then the last,' said the leader authoritatively. '"Rejoice, ye tenants of the earth," number sixty-four.'
At the close, waiting yet another minute, he said in a clear loud voice, as he had said in the village at that hour and season for the previous forty years:
‘A merry Christmas to ye!'
