Josselyn wrote a little later, and he said: "The turkie is blacker than ours. I have heard several credible persons affirm they have seen turkie-cocks that have weighed forty, yea, sixty pound. But, out of my personal, experimental knowledge, I can assure you that I have eaten my share of a turkie-cock, that, when he was pull'd and garbidg'd, weighed thirty (9) pound; and I have also seen three-score broods of young turkies on the side of a marsh, sunning of themselves in a morning betimes. But this was thirty years since; the English and the Indians having now destroyed the breed, so that 'tis now very rare to meet with a wild turkie in the woods. But some of the English bring up great store of the wild kind, which remain about the house as tame as ours in England."

The reader will not forget the funny lines of Macaulay, on the antipathy of the

Young Men's Christian Union.

Nonconformists to roast goose; and he ought to remember that, in the oldest times of all, the roast goose was the ornament of the Christmas table of England, unless indeed the "roast beef of old England" ruled the board. In a square battle between the geese and the turkeys, I am Nonconformist enough to think that the New Englanders have the best of it. And the rights and wrongs of this battle will never be understood in England, because there the Rhode Island turkey in his nobility is unknown, unless some American friend has been thoughtful enough to send him across on a swift White Star steamer. If you are deeply sunk in the tradition of the Highest Church, and therefore ignore turkey as being a beast who came after the days of Henry the Seventh, you will have to be satisfied with a Rhode Island mongrel goose. This is a goose whose ganderfather lighted once too often as he flew over to the North Pole, was wounded and had his wings clipped, and then contented himself in a home where he met some New England goose-mother more stupid than himself. As to the stupidity of geese, travelling all over the neighbors' grounds, destroying every bit of curious botany or horticulture, and making morning hideous with their yells, this paper shall not speak. But the progeny of the wild gander thus captured, and of the stupid white goose of Southeastern New England, is the mongrel goose, which is the only candidate upon the table who pretends to rival our Rhode Island turkey in his prime.

WERE you ever at the kindergarten, and was it a real kindergarten for children who would not have any play nor much amusement if they had not been there? It is one thing to make a kindergarten for ten clean, nice, little children in your own home, and have a charming girl come in and sing with them and play with them and march them about for two or three hours every morning. It is another thing to bring together two hundred and fifty children from the dirtiest and poorest homes of a liquor-ruled corner of a liquorruled town like Boston, and let them spend four or five hours in a clean atmosphere, in the company of noble teachers. This miracle of love has its great day of account and rejoicing in Christmas week, when

these two or three hundred little wretches -boys and girls, observe are arrayed by their mothers in the cleanest frocks which can be provided, and come to the kindergarten, dear little things, to give presents to each other and to give presents to those who have been kind to them.

in describing the birth of the baby boy at Bethlehem, and the presents which the oxen and the asses and the cows and the sheep and the goats and the hens and the ducks in and around the "courtly stable" made to him, you give imitations of the languages of those animals. Now you may say what you will about Darwinism, all children, before they acquire their own language, are greatly interested in the languages of beasts and birds. If they "assist" in the imitations of the story-teller,

Good Mrs. Shaw, I think, has her Christmas made glad by many a present which the little witches have given to her. Have I not on this table one and another blotter or woven mat which these children have given to me because there was some tradition that I had told them a Christmas story there?

With other hearers one has to be careful lest he repeat his old stories too often. "How happy papa will be in America," said the children of an excellent friend of mine, as he started from Birmingham, "because they have not heard his old stories there!" Walter Scott somewhere speaks of the joy of dining with the Whigs, because they had not heard his old stories. But I go every year to Miss Wiltse's charming kindergarten in Cottage Place, under a bond to tell the same story which I told the year before. This is now, indeed, a story eighteen hundred and eighty-nine years old. The great merit of it is that,

there is no harm, and the popularity of this account of the first Christmas morning is such that a repetition of it is demanded on the bills from year to year. After the story has been told and the children have given each other their presents, a mysterious door is opened, and other presents appear, which are provided by the kind overseer of all these schools, sleds and skates and puzzles and dolls and cradles and everything that heart can wish, if the heart have not been throbbing more than six or seven years. And whoever wants to see the real joy of the Christmas season will see it nowhere more than at Miss Wiltse's school.

FOR my part, I am not sorry to contrast these children, in the simple uniform of their bright faces and clean frocks, with the children at another kindergarten, well up on the hill as one goes to the State

House from Cambridge. Here are the children whom you say fortune has favored. They were born in the purple, their fathers and mothers do the best they can with them; and this best, is it not to place them with Miss Garland and Miss Weston in a kindergarten? And are not they just as glad to hear of the boy of Bethlehem

Louis Prang,

as the children were in Cottage Place, and are they not just as happy as they make their presents to each other, and they can imitate just as well the songs of the hens and the ducks, and the remarks of the sheep and the cows, as can those brothers and sisters of theirs in Cottage Place whom they have never seen. Only the fathers and mothers here have the leisure to come and see them in their festivity, and so we are all crowded together in the front parlor, while these children sing their Christmas songs and tell their Christmas stories

in the other room. The folding-doors are open, and all of us join in their festivity. But it is one party after all, Cottage Place and Chestnut Street, and one life in all these veins.

MR. BALDWIN here has picked up still another company. There are thousands

one

of young fellows who come to his great club-house, which is called the Christian Union, through the days or the evenings of the twelve months. Some come to play chess, some to play checkers, some to run races or turn somer

saults in the gymnasium, some to learn of the mathematics of poetry in the lectures, and some of the poetry of mathematics, some to have Mr. Towle tell them about the Bulgarian question, and some to have Mr. Bradford explain to them the icebergs in northern Greenland. Some come on Sunday evenings, and some on the other days and evenings during the week, at their pleasure. Shall we go

around to the Union on Saturday afternoon? Everybody in Boston knows what the Union is. Outside Boston it may be worth while to say that the Christian Union is perhaps the best young men's club-house in Boston. It suffers only from the one drawback that your assessment fee is dollar a year, instead of being fifty. But you have the newspapers, you have a library, you have conversation rooms and chess rooms, you have your gymnasium and bath-rooms, and you have a membership, in all, of over five thousand. They are always exercising themselves there about education and hospitality; and among other things they pick up from six to seven hundred of the poorest children in the town for the Saturday afternoon of Christmas week, to be sure that they have something which they need to remember Christmas by.

Here they are, all piled together in the great Union Hall. The chairman and Mr. Baldwin have wished the children a "Merry Christmas," the Cadet Band has played to them, Mrs. Powers has sung to them, Miss Marshall has made them laugh with her funny readings, Mr. Chase has cooked eggs in his hat for them and changed butterflies into white doves, in his sleight-of-hand. And then somebody has started them all singing, while Mr. Henry played on the cornet. Now comes a Christmas play; it is called "The Big Christmas-Tree and the Little Ones," and here is the tree, which is a perfectly gigantic tree, and on it are parcels for everybody. Santa Claus is not left this time to hap-hazard, but the committee who asked these little folks together has made it a part of their business to find out what they wanted. So here are books and playthings, and articles of winter clothing; and every child has his parcel ready as he goes home after his frolic. They have all had enough to eat and to drink,

"Mr. Baldwin: Dear Sir-I take my pen in hand to tell you how I spent my time at the Hall. Well, my ticket came five days before the Christmas and New Year's festible at the Union festible took place, and they were the five long days too. But Saturday came at last, and while I was getting ready in the forenoon the hands of the they moved very slowly. After dinner I went over clock seemed as though they did not move, in fact, with the ticket and was the first boy in the hall, and had the best seat I would wish to have, wright up to the stage. I had two nice boys that sot beside me, who got aqunted very quick and we had many nice and soasible talks. struck up which took to everybody ear as well as my own. Then them beautiful singers which theyr voices sounded like a real organ. When we claped for them to come out, one of the boys said to me are dont clap, I said why, he said oh! do you like

Then the music

singing, of course I do, dont you? Not much

and will have Sunday to play with the playthings, if their ecclesiastical predilections permit, and, at all events, to wear the new clothes; for nice clothing is permitted under all dispensations.

But a better account than any we can give is given in this letter, from a little humpbacked boy who had enjoyed the hospitality of the Union.

dreather have somethings else. Everything will come if you have pacients for them said I. So will 4 of July come to, said he. The next was the man that plaid the -; well I dont know the name of what he plaid on, but it was on two rows of wood all different lengths begening with long ones till they would come down to very short ones and the shorter the wood would be the higher the sound would be and the long ones were low sounds. He

played on them very nice. There was lots of other things which would take me a long time to tell and