“COL.  BELCHER ALL RIGHT.—­We are satisfied that the letter from Sevenoaks, published in yesterday’s ‘Tattler,’ in regard to our highly respected fellow-citizen, Colonel Robert Belcher, was a gross libel upon that gentleman, and intended, by the malicious writer, to injure an honorable and innocent man.  It is only another instance of the ingratitude of rural communities toward their benefactors.  We congratulate the redoubtable Colonel on his removal from so pestilent a neighborhood to a city where his sterling qualities will find ’ample scope and verge enough,’ and where those who suffer ’the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ will not lay them to the charge of one who can, with truthfulness, declare ‘Thou canst not say I did it.’”

When Mr. Belcher concluded, he muttered to himself, “Twenty dollars!—­cheap enough.”  He had remained at home the day before; now he could go upon ’Change with a face cleared of all suspicion.  A cloud of truth had overshadowed him, but it had been dissipated by the genial sunlight of falsehood.  His self-complacency was fully restored when he received a note, in the daintiest text on the daintiest paper, congratulating him on the triumphant establishment of his innocence before the New York public, and bearing as its signature a name so precious to him that he took it to his own room before destroying it and kissed it.

CHAPTER XV.

WHICH TELLS ABOUT MRS. DILLINGHAM’S CHRISTMAS AND THE NEW YEAR’S RECEPTION AT THE PALGRAVE MANSION.

A brilliant Christmas morning shone in at Mrs. Dillingham’s window, where she sat quietly sunning the better side of her nature.  Her parlor was a little paradise, and all things around her were in tasteful keeping with her beautiful self.  The Christmas chimes were deluging the air with music; throngs were passing by on their way to and from church, and exchanging the greetings of the day; wreaths of holly were in her own windows and in those of her neighbors; and the influences of the hour—­half poetical, half religious—­held the unlovely and the evil within her in benign though temporary thrall.  The good angel was dominant within her, while the bad angel slept.

Far down the vista of the ages, she was looking into a stable where a baby lay, warm in its swaddling-clothes, the mother bending over it.  She saw above the stable a single star, which, palpitating with prophecy, shook its long rays out into the form of a cross, then drew them in until they circled into a blazing crown.  Far above the star the air was populous with lambent forms and resonant with shouting voices, and she heard the words:  “Peace on earth, good-will to men!” The chimes melted into her reverie; the kindly sun encouraged it; the voices of happy children fed it, and she was moved to tears.