It’s a merry Christmas, this Twenty-fifth of December, eighteen hundred and eighty-seven,—­a very merry Christmas; times have scarcely changed at all in the last thirty years.  The sun shines down brightly, and the frosty air is fall of gladness; for Santa Claus, with his untold wonders, has come and gone.  Ecstasies over dolls and transports over tea-sets, screams of delight at hobby-horses and enthusiastic exclamations at humming-tops, have passed.  Paint-boxes and writing-desks, leaden soldiers and tin trumpets, at last, are reduced to blissful matters of course.  The streets, which all the morning have been thronged with laughing groups of happy children, are now almost deserted.  Senators and cabmen, ministers of state and town constables, romping school-girls and worn-out actresses, Lady Dedlock and her washer-woman, men, women, and children of all degrees, have quietly seated themselves to roasted turkey and plum-pudding.  Even the little boys who will play marbles under the library windows, who are constantly being “fat” and wanting “ups” and “roundings,” and who are invariably ordered to “knuckle down and bore it hard,” are now intently occupied with the succulent delights of “drum-sticks” and gizzards.  And yet the man whose fingers now form these letters then sits alone.  Time has not passed lightly over his head.  The few hairs that straggle from beneath his skull-cap are gray, and the faintest breath makes him wrap closer in his thickly-wadded dressing-gown.  His face is worn and pale, and the wrinkled hand, though it only holds a little cigarette, will sometimes tremble as it moves.  The Christmas dinner is pushed away untasted. Chateau-Margaux has lost its flavor, and silver and crystal do not bring appetite now.  Even the glowing sunshine, which plate-glass and silk damask cannot keep out, is unheeded.  He gazes wearily at the magnificent furniture, and smokes.  He has talked much to the world, and it has heard him.  Flung into life without a friend, governed only by the will of a race born to command, he has struggled through sneers and sarcasm to eminence.  Men fear him now, women flatter, nearly all envy; yet he is alone.  He knows this; he knows that in all the laughing groups who enjoy this wine-drinking and turkey-eating day his name has not been mentioned once.  Nature allows no trifling with her laws; flowers do not bloom in deserts.  He has crushed sentiment; he has stifled affection.  With a heart by nature kindly, he sits now an image cut in steel.  He gazes calmly at his desolate hearth, at his joyless age, and smokes.  Man has no power to move him; fate condemned him to be a statue.