This, then, is Christmas, 1862.  Everything is silent in Dreamthorp.  The smith’s hammer reposes beside the anvil.  The weaver’s flying shuttle is at rest.  Through the clear wintry sunshine the bells this morning rang from the gray church tower amid the leafless elms, and up the walk the villagers trooped in their best dresses and their best faces—­the latter a little reddened by the sharp wind:  mere redness in the middle aged; in the maids, wonderful bloom to the eyes of their lovers—­and took their places decently in the ancient pews.  The clerk read the beautiful prayers of our Church, which seem more beautiful at Christmas than at any other period.  For that very feeling which breaks down at this time the barriers which custom, birth, or wealth have erected between man and man, strikes down the barrier of time which intervenes between the worshipper of to-day and the great body of worshippers who are at rest in their graves.  On such a day as this, hearing these prayers, we feel a kinship with the devout generations who heard them long ago.  The devout lips of the Christian dead murmured the responses which we now murmur; along this road of prayer did their thoughts of our innumerable dead, our brothers and sisters in faith and hope, approach the Maker, even as ours at present approach Him.  Prayers over, the clergyman—­who is no Boanerges, or Chrysostom, golden-mouthed, but a loving, genial-hearted, pious man, the whole extent of his life from boyhood until now, full of charity and kindly deeds, as autumn fields with heavy wheaten ears; the clergyman, I say—­for the sentence is becoming unwieldy on my hands, and one must double back to secure connexion—­read out in that silvery voice of his, which is sweeter than any music to my ear, those chapters of the New Testament that deal with the birth of the Saviour.  And the red-faced rustic congregation hung on the good man’s voice as he spoke of the Infant brought forth in a manger, of the shining angels that appeared in mid-air to the shepherds, of the miraculous star that took its station in the sky, and of the wise men who came from afar and laid their gifts of frankincense and myrrh at the feet of the child.  With the story every one was familiar, but on that day, and backed by the persuasive melody of the reader’s voice, it seemed to all quite new—­at least, they listened attentively as if it were.  The discourse that followed possessed no remarkable thoughts; it dealt simply with the goodness of the Maker of heaven and earth, and the shortness of time, with the duties of thankfulness and charity to the poor; and I am persuaded that every one who heard returned to his house in a better frame of mind.  And so the service remitted us all to our own homes, to what roast-beef and plum-pudding slender means permitted, to gatherings around cheerful fires, to half-pleasant, half-sad remembrances of the dead and the absent.