It is
very queer, being customarily so respectful, that they should assume this
license now, absolutely trying to pull the gentlemen into the kitchen by
main force, and kissing the harder and more abundantly the more they were
resisted. A little rosy-checked Scotch lass--at other times very modest
--was the most active in this business. I doubt whether any gentleman
but myself escaped. I heard old Mr. S------ parleying with the maids
last evening, and pleading his age; but he seems to have met with no
mercy, for there was a sound of prodigious smacking immediately
afterwards. J----- was assaulted, and fought, most vigorously; but was
outrageously kissed,--receiving some scratches, moreover, in the
conflict. The mistletoe has white, wax-looking berries, and dull green
leaves, with a parasitical stem.
Early in the morning of Christmas day, long before daylight, I heard
music in the street, and a woman's voice, powerful and melodious, singing
a Christmas hymn. Before bedtime I presume one half of England, at a
moderate calculation, was the worse for liquor.
The market-houses, at this season, show the national taste for heavy
feeding,--carcasses of prize oxen, immensely fat, and bulky; fat sheep,
with their woolly heads and tails still on, and stars and other devices
ingeniously wrought on the quarters; fat pigs, adorned with flowers, like
corpses of virgins; hares, wild-fowl, geese, ducks, turkeys; and green
boughs and banners suspended about the stalls,--and a great deal of dirt
and griminess on the stone floor of the market-house, and on the persons
of the crowd.
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