Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/689

 . 15, 1860.] or ten turkies, each surrounded with sausages and some small dainties, and half-a-dozen vast raised pies, flanked with baking pears, dried apples, or small game. When all are packed and off to the station, the main part of our Christmas work is done. It is owing to this custom that my friends see certain dainties on my table that we ourselves should never think of inquiring after,—prime caviare direct from Russia, West India preserves, sturgeon, German brawn, liqueurs, besides barrels of oysters, pines, salmon, and imported fruits. Whether it is true or not that our old English hospitality is degenerating, it is wise and pleasant to keep up this kind of observance between town and country.

These last words remind one of the days when London itself was the very centre of snipe-shooting. In the times of the Edwards and the Henrys a frost was a circumstance of importance in London; for it enabled the citizens to go out on the surrounding marshes to sport. There they knocked down and snared all the birds which frequent watery places, and obtained eels in profusion. I have thought of that aspect of our London when, in wild colonial regions, I have seen a snipe swinging on a bulrush, just as the frogs were opening their evening concerts, and not a man besides myself was in sight, unless it were a settler, looking after wild fowl or eels. In such a place I have imagined the aspect of that ancient London, with its few great towers and spires, and its straggling group of villages round that centre, and the marshes coming up to the very causeways. I have recalled the same image when at the Baker Street Cattle Show, or as I entered London at Christmas time, and saw the loads of provisions brought in on iron roads, on the same spots where, of old, the sportsmen and their attendants brought in their game on their own shoulders, picking their way over the frozen swamps.

Interesting as it is to us to look back, what would it have been to those Londoners to see forward into our days! How wonderful a mere grocer’s shop would have appeared, with its variety of imported fruits, its firkins of butter and tall piles of cheeses, with sprigs of holly everywhere! Yet more astonishing would have been the vision of the fat beasts at Baker Street, to men whose only idea of winter meat was the flesh of lean cows or tough bullocks, salted down in autumn, for want of keep for the winter! They had their game, their boar’s heads, and other things; but the prime beef of our century—fat and juicy in midwinter—would have been something miraculous in their eyes. So would any Christmas market, in any provincial town, with its evergreen adornments, its neat and clean stall-keepers, displaying their heaps of provisions, where the outpost of fish is merely introductory to a great camp full of meat, poultry, game, fruit and flowers. Yes, flowers,—in great variety! Such a vision would have made them fancy that men had grown wise enough to strip the seasons of their drawbacks, making winter as the summer.

How far is this from being the case! I am not going to question the substantial improvement in