THERE is a curious skeleton in Jedd Pallfry's heart, and every Christmas-eve it turns and twists, and makes the old man feel queer pains and see strange sights.

These skeletons are very common to the human race generally. They are the phantoms of evil deeds and malignant thoughts-mental afrites that grow up in a single night, like toad-stools. Be wary, that you may not have one growing in your bosom. It will show itself. Mrs. Mac Elegant cannot drape hers with all the silks and brocades in Stewart's, nor old Three-per-cent his : it goes to the very bed-chamber with him and rides in his cushioned carriage. It walks with him in Wall-street and sits beside him at church.

But the undertaker's skeleton for the present.

There was never any body prettier than Nannette Pallfry. Indeed it would be hard to find in any woman's eyes a more enchanting light than that which lay in Nannette's. Her voice, like the poet's western wind, was sweet and low. She was as lovely and natural as a summer wild-flower, and so good that sin in her was not evil.

Mr. Theologician, you would interrupt me.

I will explain if she had been less worthy of heaven, if she had been more worldly wise, cautious instead of loving, artful instead of sincere, in short, any thing but the very angel she was, Nannette's life would have seemed purer in the world's eyes; but not in God's. I know that.

Nannette's history is an old story, told every day. For shame, man! that it is told every day! She lived, and loved, and trusted, and that is all of it, or nearly.

One December night she came in the snow to her father's door, and he turned her away Nannette, the only thing in all GOD's world he loved with a human love. She did not weep, she did not even murmur she only pressed the hand of a child who walked wearily beside her, and passed on.

Her life from that time was so full of suffering, yet so womanly and true, that the angels might sit and listen to a narration of it with delight. Nannette went far away from the city, and in a little town by the sedgy sea-shore, taught her boy to pray.

Year after year went by.

The world rolled on like a great wheel: men, and women, and children dropped off like flies, and Jedd Pallfry's hammer was busy-oh! so busy! Now while shrouds were being made, and coffins varnished, and the old world was turning on its axis, Nannette died.

He

The night of her death, just as old Jedd was fitting the lining to an infant's coffin, a grave grew up at his feet - a willow and a rose-bush, and he heard the singing of birds! He knew what it meant. knew that somewhere he could not tell where - there was another mound just like the one beside him. Oh! how blithely the little birds sang to Jedd. There were a new heaven and a new earth for some body that night, and how merrily the robins sang about it! All this

happened while the snow-flakes were running nimbly over the housetops like little white mice!

Every Christmas-eve, at the same hour, Jedd sees this phantom mound with its sighing willow-tree, and its lovely flowers, and its fairy birds, flitting here and there like the fragments of a broken rainbow! And at night he has a fearful dream. He fancies that four Fever-fiends are tossing him in his best velvet pall. Yellow Jack, with his great jaundiced visage, Brain-fever, shouting deliriously, Scarlet-fever, with red-hot eyes and putrid lips, and Typhoid, still and dreadful — he sees them all! and they paw him with their disgusting hands, and kiss him on the mouth till poor old Jedd is near going mad with agony and fear.

Nannette's child was adopted by a fisherman's wife, and very badly adopted; for when poor Tom was not busy catching fish, he was catching something else. So between boating and beating, the child was not as happy as he might have been with more of one and less of the other, or a gentile sufficiency of both. Having indulged in four years' experience in being whaled, he took it into his head to have a hand in the business himself. To be, or not to be,' was a question in the boy's mind; and 'not to be' beaten any more was his decision: so one fine morning, without as much as the cognizance of his beloved mother, Amphitrite, he placed his name on the books of the good ship Marie Theresa,' and sailed out of port with a light heart, one suit of clothes, and a prospect of hard work, which is all the rig out' a true sailor needs, HEAVEN bless him!

6

But Tom was too delicately made for a whaling voyage, and after wasting three years of the golden part of his life, he found himself in our great city one night, without money, or friends, or a place to die in. He wandered from street to street so charmed with the mad wrangling of sleigh-bells a new music to him and so dazzled by the shop-windows, that he forgot his hunger and the web of difficulties which Time and Fate, the busy monsters! were weaving for him. But hunger under such circumstances, like a renewed note, only spares one for a little while. It came back to him with interest, his hunger, and he grew disconsolate.

The city, with all its strange newness, was forgotten in turn. The snow chilled him, and the happy children buying toys in the grand shops, and the merry sleighs darting through the street like swallows, gave him an acute sense of loneliness. There were no mother and sisters to put gay presents in his stockings. Indeed, if there had been, they might have bought the stocking too, for never a one had Tom on those cold little feet!

Tom looked in Maillard's window at the rare pastry and confections. and his hunger grew maddening. He turned from the heaped delicacies, fearing that he might be tempted to thrust his arm through the thick plate-glass and help himself. He turned away in gastronomic agony, did Tomtit, and hearing the children cry Merry Christmas! wondered what it was and where it could be!

Poor Tom, I have been looking for it these five years!

Nantuck passed rapidly up Broadway, and then, to avoid the heed

Fate led him,

less throng, crossed over to the western part of the town.
for Fate deigns even to shape the lives of such estrays as Tomtit.

Once he paused at a baker's door and looked so longingly at a waiter of fresh tarts on the counter, that the shop-girl gave him one, and her glossy curls shook all over with delight at the ravenous way he devoured it.

'Poor fellow,' said the girl, sobering, he must have been fearfully hungry.'

He was ratherish, and he annihilated two tarts with enthusiasm. As he turned out of one of the cross-streets which lead into Sixth Avenue, he beheld an old man looking in an undertaker's window, as if he were weary of life, and a desire to accost him and beg shelter, or directions for finding it, overcame his pride, which was but a remnant of its former self. He approached the man, who took no notice of him whatever, but continued to glare at the window with a wildness that almost startled Tom from his design. Now our humble hero was never blessed, or afflicted, as the case may be, with great colloquial powers, and he was somewhat at loss as to how he should open a conversation with the eccentric and unique individual before him. In this dilemma the words he had heard spoken a thousand times that night broke musically over his lips:

Merry Christmas, Sir!'

Then it was that Jedd Pallfry turned and looked at him, and said: 'Humph!'

WE left Tomtit floored, literally, at Chapter II.

The hours went by like shadows, and he still lay under the charmed influence of sleep Sleep, the little sprite, from the land of Nowhere, that sits upon tired eye-lids and weighs them down so kindly. Erratic and coquettish Sleep, that will and won't, and is so very like a woman! so hard to win, so exquisite and true when won.

Tom lay dreaming of ships, anchors, and ambergris, of Nantucket and fish, and silent fields,

'WHERE calm and deep

The sun-shine lieth like a golden sleep!'

In the midst of this the fire in the diminutive stove went out and now commenced a combat between the warmth of the dreamer's fancy and the coldness which was gradually taking possession of the room. The alarm of a conflagration in the next street, the muffled sound of the engine, dragged furiously past the door by men who seemed like demons red-hot from Pandemonium, and the jubilant clash of sleighbells now and then, had failed to move the sleeper. But the silent, invisible lips of the Chill-fiend were eating into his slumber, and he dreamed of icicles! His little embrowned hand lost its hold of the stool, and after one or two involuntary turns, he opened his eyes the fact that it was growing intensely cold.

to

It was in vain that he drew himself together, like a turtle: the cold touched the outer circles of his body, and sleep deserted him. He spied the velvet pall on the counter, and in a moment he had enveloped

himself in its dreadful folds. But the death-cloth warmed him no more than if he had been dead. In fact it threw a chill over him, and he seemed covered with a black frost, colder than the snowy tracery which grew like magic over the shop-windows! He threw the pall from him as if it had been a pest, and tried to warm his hands by the jet of gas which burned azure, and yellow, and all colors. But it only

aggravated his coldness.

The idea of freezing to death took hold of Tom, and out of this grew a strange act. His eyes fell on a coffin which he thought would hold him comfortably. It nearly exhausted his strength to lay the silkpadded box on the floor. This being done, he settled himself into it without hesitation, and once more made a coverlid of the heavy pall.

Then Tomtit fell asleep again and commenced dreaming of dreary oceans and lonely isles, and fairy lands forlorn,' of cross-bones and eyeless skulls, church-yards and epitaphs, and GOD knows what! Just then a brazen-lipped sentinel in a neighboring belfry solemnly told out the hour, and, unseen save by GoD's own eye, high up the steeple in the snow, and wind, and sleet, a ghostly finger pointed to the cabalistic figures XII.

JEDD PALLFRY was detained at the Spuyten Duyvel's longer than he had anticipated — two hours longer; and the clock struck twelve as he whirled round the corner, and brought himself up against the wind in front of his shop. The long tails of his thread-bare over-coat were flying all ways, and he looked like a great hideous owl lost in the night.

When Jedd threw open the door, he started back.

There, in the middle of the shop, just where the spectral grave sprang up yearly, lay a pall-covered coffin, the gas going out, and the boy gone! The place seemed chilly and damp like a vault, and Jedd shivered so, that the snow-flakes flew from him in every direction like sparks from a scissor-grinder's grind-stone. The stiffness in his knees gave out, and he supported himself against the counter.

Now one of those changes came over Jedd Pallfry which happen to us all at times, and for which philosophy's self cannot account. With resolute and fearless steps he approached the coffin and lifted the pall. The light, which seemed to brighten up a little, fell aslant on Tom sleeping. The strange young face, shaded by tangled curls of nutbrown hair, and lacking the soft influence of his closed eyes, was almost wild in its beauty. The parted lips seemed ready to speak, but they moved not; the eye-lids twitched, but were not lifted: and he lay a double picture - Life and Death!

Jedd started, but not with fear. He felt something trembling, throbbing, warming in his bosom. It was only his heart melting! The nature and humanity of the man had broken their fetters like reeds, and the love which had lain in a trance for a dozen years, rose up within him, and would be heard! His heart knew the little stranger in the coffin, and he bent over him with a tenderness that belongs to

woman.

'Nannette!' he said softly; oh! so wonderfully like Nannette!' The boy opened his eyes and looked about him confusedly. He attempted to rise, but his strength had succumbed to cold and hunger; and he sank back with a sickly smile.

'I'm so very hungry, Sir!

'Only speak to me!' cried Jedd, hoarse with emotion; 'only say if you are Nannette's child!'

'Nannette, Nannette,' said the boy dreamily. Is some one calling my mother?'

The old man said not a word at this, but knelt down by the coffin and wept.

The clock struck one as Jedd Pallfry passed through the blinding sleet with something heavy in his arms-something wrapped in a pall. A drowsy policeman, ensconced in a door-way out of the storm, hailed him, and the drifted snow was more than knee-deep-but Jedd, heeding neither, struggled on with his burden.

Then a brilliant coal-fire threw a lurid and pleasant glow over old Jedd's sitting-room. The elderly house-keeper-completely dressed, with the exception of a night-cap which she had forgotten to remove -hurried to-and-fro in a state of mind,' collecting more jugs of hot water than would be required to warm the feet of all her Majesty's subjects in the Crimea. Close by the grate, in a Daniel Lambert of an easy-chair, sat the unconscious Tom, with Jedd soothing one of his hands and gazing anxiously in his face. So an hour went by, and then the child's eyes unclosed; and Jedd Pallfry took him in his arms, and the old man's whole heart was a prayer a prayer to HIM Who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb!'

When I have said that terrible dreams and strange visions never haunted Jedd Pallfry after that night, I have said all. So is my story done.

THE Snow has ceased falling, and through my window I can see the crisp stars twinkle like bits of chrysolite. The city bells are ringing a requiem for the dying mid-night, for the dying year. Silver voices from dizzy turrets are calling to each other mournfully, dolefully. A chill and a foreboding hang over all! And now the bells clang merrily:

'RING out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

'Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

'Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind."

'Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife:
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.