of what it can do, to the love of money because it is money.  I have not yet reached the furniture stage, and I do not think I ever shall.  I would rather burn them all.  Meantime, I think one safeguard is to encourage one’s friends to borrow one’s books—­not to offer individual books, which is much the same as offering advice.  That will probably take some of the shine off them, and put a few thumb-marks in them, which both are very wholesome towards the arresting of the furniture declension.  For my part, thumb-marks I find very obnoxious—­far more so than the spoiling of the binding.—­I know that some of my readers, who have had sad experience of the sort, will be saying in themselves, “He might have mentioned a surer antidote resulting from this measure, than either rubbed Russia or dirty glove-marks even—­that of utter disappearance and irreparable loss.”  But no; that has seldom happened to me—­because I trust my pocketbook, and never my memory, with the names of those to whom the individual books are committed.—­There, then, is a little bit of practical advice in both directions for young book-lovers.

Again I am reminded that I am getting old.  What digressions!

Gazing about on my treasures, the thought suddenly struck me that I had never done as I had promised Judy; had never found out what her aunt’s name meant in Anglo-Saxon.  I would do so now.  I got down my dictionary, and soon discovered that Ethelwyn meant Home-joy, or Inheritance.

“A lovely meaning,” I said to myself.

And then I went off into another reverie, with the composition of which I shall not trouble my reader; and with the mention of which I had, perhaps, no right to occupy the fragment of his time spent in reading it, seeing I did not intend to tell him how it was made up.  I will tell him something else instead.

Several families had asked me to take my Christmas dinner with them; but, not liking to be thus limited, I had answered each that I would not, if they would excuse me, but would look in some time or other in the course of the evening.

When my half-hour was out, I got up and filled my pockets with little presents for my poor people, and set out to find them in their own homes.

I was variously received, but unvaryingly with kindness; and my little presents were accepted, at least in most instances, with a gratitude which made me ashamed of them and of myself too for a few moments.  Mrs. Tomkins looked as if she had never seen so much tea together before, though there was only a couple of pounds of it; and her husband received a pair of warm trousers none the less cordially that they were not quite new, the fact being that I found I did not myself need such warm clothing this winter as I had needed the last.  I did not dare to offer Catherine Weir anything, but I gave her little boy a box of water-colours—­in remembrance of the first time I saw him, though I said nothing about that.  His mother did not thank me.  She told little Gerard to do so, however, and that was something.  And, indeed, the boy’s sweetness would have been enough for both.