The stiff formality and the ridiculous solemnity of the old Puritan times still linger about these secluded New England hamlets.  But each winter a huge Christmas tree is set up in the church of the village I have mentioned, and loaded with presents.  The winter I was there I went to see the distribution.  Recollecting the delightful Christmas days of my own childhood, I was anticipating great pleasure.  Of course I was going to look in on a scene of childish joy, of shouting and laughing, and eating of candy and pop-corn in unlimited quantities.  Memories of the stories of Hans Andersen and the Grimm brothers were floating through my mind as I crunched the crisp snow under my feet on my way to the church.  I remembered the rapture of those Christmas mornings at home, when we children stole down stairs by candlelight to the warm room filled with the aromatic perfume of the Christmas tree, that stood there resplendent with presents from old Santa Claus—­Noah’s arks, mimic landscapes, dolls, sleds, colored cornucopias bursting with bonbons, and especially those books of fairy-tales from whose rich creamy pages exhaled a most divine and musty fragrance.  Ah, the memory of our childhood’s hours! what is it but that enchanted lake of the Arabian tale, from whose quiet depths we are ever and anon drawing up in our nets some magic colored fish?  Well, I reached the church.  The children, dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, were sitting in the high-backed pews in solemn silence, while a reverend gentleman was delivering a solemn exhortation to gratitude and goodness.  Another followed.  “Very well, gentlemen,” thought I, “but now please to retire and give up the field to these children.”  But no.  The superintendent of the Sunday-school now advanced:  the children marched up one by one, as their names were called, and received their presents from him.  Some of them came very near grinning (poor things!), but in general they looked as if they were going to their execution.  When all was done the meeting was dismissed!

Sauntering through the streets of this village, and making note of the quaint idiosyncrasies and irregularities of character and manner displayed by its humbler folk, I thought of the sentiment which Thoreau so exquisitely expresses in his Week:  “The forms of beauty fall naturally around him who is in the performance of his proper work, as the curled shavings drop from the plane and borings cluster round the auger.”  Picturesqueness characterizes the New England white laborer, as it does the Southern black laborer:  especially is this true of those who have emigrated from Europe when of adult age, and have been unable to lay aside the picturesque features of their Old-World life.