Daylight puts an end to all sleep, for the boys are on the piazza ready to welcome Christmas with innumerable packages of fire-crackers.  We rise to find our pantaloons sewed up, our boots stuffed with wet cotton, our tooth-brushes dusted with quinine and our cafe noir sweetened with salt.  These practical jokes are all taken in good part and made to contribute to the jollity of the season.  At the breakfast-table lumps of cracked marble serve admirably for loaf-sugar, except that the hottest coffee will not dissolve them, and boiled eggs tempt the appetite only to disappoint with their sawdust filling.  Then all assemble on the piazza to witness the merriment of the crowd of negroes who have assembled to claim little gifts of tobacco and sugar and to receive the annual glass of whisky which a time-honored custom bestows.  The liquor is served in a wine-glass, and swallowed eagerly by men, women and boys from ten years old upward.  Then they disperse to get their portion of the Christmas beef which has been slaughtered for their special benefit, and we prepare for service at the parish church, which stands among the shadows of the old forest oaks an easy walk from the house.  There the solemn services temper and soften, but do not check or lessen, the joy and good-will which so well become the season, and which find their appropriate manifestation in all kinds of innocent amusement.  The religious and the social observances of the day react each upon the other, and harmonize most admirably in the impressions which they produce.  The interchange of gifts and tokens around the Christmas tree follows most appropriately, and the Christmas feast is marked by profuse hospitality and keen enjoyment unmarred by riot or excess.

Ah, well! there are piles of dusty memories in the old cockloft still untouched, but I shall rummage no more to-night.  The scenes which have floated past me with the wreathing smoke of my cigar are green and fragrant to me with a freshness which time can never blight, but they never can harden into reality again for any mortal experience.  They have gone into the irretrievable past with a state of things which some may regret and others rejoice in, and well will it be if the new regime shall supply their places with other pictures which twenty years hence it may be no less pleasant to remember.

ROBERT WILSON.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.

From the 27th to the 30th of September all Stuttgart flocks to Cannstatt for the Volksfest; and this year every good Wuertemberger was bound to feel an additional interest in the fete on account of the opening ceremony, the inauguration of a statue to the late king, Wilhelm I.—­and “well beloved,” one is tempted to add from the way in which his people still speak of him.  “The old king” and “this one” they say with an inflection of voice anything but flattering to the latter.