Is coming, fellow Students! What with our studies in Greek, Latin, Mathematics, History and Science, and all the other multiplied occupations of our College life, the days of another year have rolled rapidly away, and are nearly all numbered among those that were. There remain to us, of term time, but a few transition hours, linking the Future with the Past. We are looking forward to the quiet and enjoyment of a needed and desired vacation. And we now feel far more like revelling in anticipations of the future or in reminiscences of the past, than engaging in any deep cogitations or penning studied essays. Politics, morals, philosophy, and all sorts of learning are good in their place"there is a time to work"-but there is a time, also, to laugh and play, and that time, we joy to say it, is at hand. A year ago, during the last days of Eighteen Hundred and Fifty, there was recorded upon a leaf of our memory's tablets, then new and fresh, a series of delightful scenes. We opened to that leaf to night, and it was a happy hour we spent in our review of them. And we would like, dear reader, to sit down by your side, and go over with you that record of the merry pranks of Santa Claus' 'Jolly old soul," and of the merriness and happiness of Christmas and New Year's days; to tell you of the way we found of being happy during the week of holidays. Frightened from spending vacation in the city of our student sojourn, by the dismal picture of the loneliness of life there at such a season, drawn in the No. of the Yale Lit. issued just before the close of the fall term of '50, we posted down on Christmas day, at the invitation of our classmate D, into the midst of those piles of brick and stone covering the south end of Manhattan Island and yclept New York. There we found friendly, brotherly, sisterly, fatherly, motherly hearts! Yes! there in the midst of the busy, bustling city, where squalid misery and splendid misery so strangely mingle together, and where the crowds pouring through the streets seem to a stranger who looks at the outside of things, to preclude the hope of finding quiet and sociably happy domestic circles. But, stranger, they are there! We found it so, to our delight, being made to feel at once at home, though home was distant nearly half a thousand miles. A volume would hardly describe at length the pleasures of that week of holidays. But the mode of enjoying Christmas evening, and the last night of the Old Year, was to us so novel, so peculiar and so delightful, that we cannot refrain from attempting to give, so far as description can do it, a picture of that joy-abounding season. On Christmas afternoon, our physicalities having been fortified for the evening, and prepared to undergo the toils of laughter, by a plentiful Christmas dinner, varied conversation and parlor amusements occupied the company very agreeably during the earlier portion of the evening. The guests invited having all at length assembled, a small tree, covered with gifts, was suddenly brought in, and exposed to our admiring view. While the beauty of this was calling out exclamations of delight from all, and we momentarily expected the scissors to commence their work in cutting off the presents for distribution, there appeared near by the tree, an old man, with bent form, trembling limbs, silver locks, spectacles and cane. Ralph Hoyt has almost perfectly described him: "Buckled knee and shoe, and broad rimmed hat, There he sat, Buckled knee and shoe, and broad rimmed hat." His voice had the quiver of age in it, as he feebly addressed his children and grandchildren, frolicking, all mirth and enjoyment, around him. But suddenly interrupting him, in bounded that jolly, fat and funny old elf, Santa Claus. His array was indescribably fantastic. He seemed to have done his best; and we should think, had Mrs. Santa Claus to help him. The poet who sang of him the song— would hardly have recognized him, yet we knew it could be no other |