Lycidas and I tumbled in on the back seat, each with a child in his lap to keep us warm; I flanked by Sam Perry, and he by John Rich, both of the mercurial age, and therefore good to do errands.  Harry was in front somewhere flanked in like wise, and the other children lay in miscellaneously between, like sardines when you have first opened the box I had invited Lycidas, because, besides being my best friend, he is the best fellow in the world, and so deserves the best Christmas eve can give him.  Under the full moon, on the still white snow, with sixteen children at the happiest, and with the blessed memories of the best the world has ever had, there can be nothing better than two or three such hours.

“First, driver, out on Commonwealth Avenue.  That will tone down the horses.  Stop on the left after you have passed Fairfield Street.”  So we dashed up to the front of Haliburton’s palace, where he was keeping his first Christmas tide.  And the children, whom Harry had hushed down for a square or two, broke forth with good full voice under his strong lead in

    “Shepherd of tender sheep,”

singing with all that unconscious pathos with which children do sing, and starting the tears in your eyes in the midst of your gladness.  The instant the horses’ bells stopped their voices began.  In an instant more we saw Haliburton and Anna run to the window and pull up the shades, and in a minute more faces at all the windows.  And so the children sung through Clement’s old hymn.  Little did Clement think of bells and snow, as he taught it in his Sunday school there in Alexandria.  But perhaps to-day, as they pin up the laurels and the palm in the chapel at Alexandria, they are humming the words, not thinking of Clement more than he thought of us.  As the children closed with

    “Swell the triumphant song
    To Christ, our King.”

Haliburton came running out, and begged me to bring them in.  But I told him, “No,” as soon as I could hush their shouts of “Merry Christmas”; that we had a long journey before us, and must not alight by the way.  And the children broke out with

    “Hail to the night,
    Hail to the day,”

rather a favorite,—­quicker and more to the childish taste perhaps than the other,—­and with another “Merry Christmas” we were off again.

Off, the length of Commonwealth Avenue, to where it crosses the Brookline branch of the Mill-Dam, dashing along with the gayest of the sleighing-parties as we came back into town, up Chestnut Street, through Louisburg Square; ran the sleigh into a bank on the slope of Pinckney Street in front of Walter’s house; and, before they suspected there that any one had come, the children were singing

    “Carol, carol, Christians,
    Carol joyfully.”

Kisses flung from the window; kisses flung back from the street.  “Merry Christmas” again with a good-will, and then one of the girls began,