on the highest subjects, and what a listener she was!  So intelligent and appreciative, and with such an exquisite pose of the head—­it must inspire a block of wood merely to see such a creature in a listening attitude.  As to our young friend, he poured forth volumes; he was really clever, and for her he became eloquent.  To-night he spoke of Christmas, of time-honoured custom and old association; and what he said would have made a Christmas article for a magazine of the first class.  He poured scorn on the cold nature that could not, and the affectation that would not, appreciate the domestic festivities of this sacred season.  What, he asked, could be more delightful, more perfect than such a gathering as this, of the family circle round the Christmas hearth?  He spoke with feeling, and it may be said with disinterested feeling, for he had not joined his family circle himself this Christmas, and there was a vacant place by the hearth of his own home.

“He is strange,” said the young lady (she spoke of the tutor in answer to the above remark); “but I am very fond of him.  He has been with us so long he is like one of the family; though we know as little of his history as we did on the day he came.”

“He looks clever,” said the visitor. (Perhaps that is the least one can say for a fellow-creature who shows a great deal of bare skull, and is not otherwise good-looking.)

“He is clever,” she answered, “wonderfully clever; so clever and so odd that sometimes I fancy he is hardly ‘canny.’  There is something almost supernatural about his acuteness and his ingenuity, but they are so kindly used; I wonder he has not brought out any playthings for us to-night.”

“Playthings?” inquired the young man.

“Yes; on birthdays or festivals like this he generally brings something out of those huge pockets of his.  He has been all over the world, and he produces Indian puzzles, Japanese flower-buds that bloom in hot water, and German toys with complicated machinery, which I suspect him of manufacturing himself.  I call him Godpapa Grosselmayer, after that delightful old fellow in Hoffman’s tale of the Nut Cracker.”

“What’s that about crackers?” inquired the tutor, sharply, his eyes changing colour like a fire opal.

“I am talking of Nussnacker und Mausekoenig,” laughed the young lady.  “Crackers do not belong to Christmas; fireworks come on the 5th of November.”

“Tut, tut!” said the tutor; “I always tell your ladyship that you are still a tom-boy at heart, as when I first came, and you climbed trees and pelted myself and my young students with horse-chestnuts.  You think of crackers to explode at the heels of timorous old gentlemen in a November fog; but I mean bonbon crackers, coloured crackers, dainty crackers—­crackers for young people with mottoes of sentiment” (here the tutor shrugged his high shoulders an inch or two higher, and turned the palms of his hands outwards with a glance indescribably comical)—­“crackers with paper prodigies, crackers with sweetmeats—­such sweetmeats!” He smacked his lips with a grotesque contortion, and looked at Master McGreedy, who choked himself with his last raisin, and forthwith burst into tears.