On the first day of Christmas, my true love read to me
FINE old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and colour with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.’
‘The dinner was served up in the Great Hall, where the Squire always held his Christmas banquet.’
‘“The most beautiful crime I ever committed,” Flambeau would say in his highly moral old age, “was also, by a singular coincidence, my last. It was committed at Christmas.”’
My mother loved to read aloud—as Strickland Gillilan wrote more than 100 years ago: ‘You may have tangible wealth untold. Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer
