“All this is very well,” said Tom Black, assuming a grumbling tone. “But I should look forward to Mr. Challoner’s coming with much more delight if I did not fear that it will end my days here; he will want all his house for himself!”
“Charlie’s coming will bring you nothing but good, Tom,” she observed, “and you know that well enough. You have been a great help to me, and Charlie will be even more grateful than I am. But there is something for which we can all be grateful together, at the very present moment—to wit, that no poor Jessie Morison is spoiling the peace of this Christmas Day. I was in the kitchen half an hour ago, and Clementina has got everything most conscientiously in order.”
“Nevertheless she’s something of a spoil-sport,” put in Tom. “I wonder if it takes any nourishment out of one’s food when the cook is always sighing?”
Hugh had been perched up in the window, watching cabs which were bringing Christmas guests to the neighbours. At this instant he turned, crying—
“Something is the matter opposite. Policemen!”
“Is it a chimney on fire?” asked Miss Latimer.
“Catch, then, O catch the transient hour, Improve each moment as it flies, Life’s a short summer, man a flower, He dies—alas! how soon he dies!”
I will not begin by saying—as so many people do—that the small amount of sunshine we get in this country is not worth mentioning. This is not the case. Would you be surprised to learn that we have enough for health’s sake, and that when we do not get actual summer sunshine, we get the summer light all around us out of doors? That this light is diffused, filtered for us through the clouds that float high above, and that many people of wealth who leave this land of ours to seek for sunnier soils and sunnier shores, about the Riviera, the isles of the blue Levant or Madeira and the Canaries, make a most egregious mistake, and their health would be vastly improved were they to spend their time in the cool green midlands of England, on the sunshiny braes and hills of majestic Scotland or even down at our own seaside watering-places—quiet ones, mind you—where the wavelets ripple with gladsome laughter as they break on the golden sands?
The maids of merry England seldom need the dry hot sunshine of the Soudan or banks of the gliding Nile. Our maidens, I maintain, are flowers, and beautiful flowers too, but not like those on far southern shores that can without hurt or harm stare the sun in the face. There is as much difference indeed between an English, Scottish, or Irish girl, and an Italian or Spanish as there is between the violets blue and the crimson flower of the cactus.