Splash!—­a great brown trout rolls in the shallow water like a porpoise in the sea.  A two-pounder in this little stream makes as much fuss as a twenty-pound salmon in the mighty Tweed.

Hark! was that a lamb bleating down in old Mr. Peregrine’s meadow?  It was:  the first lamb, herald of the spring that is to be.  May its little life be as peaceful as this its first birthday:  less stormy than the life of that Lamb whose birth all people celebrate to-day.

The rooks are cawing, and a faint cry of plover comes from the hill.

Soft and grey is the winter sky, but behold! round the sun in the west there arises a perfect solar halo, very similar to an ordinary rainbow, but smaller in its arc and fainter in its hues of yellow and rose—­a very beautiful phenomenon, and one seldom to be seen in England.  Halos of this nature are supposed to arise from the double refraction of the rays from the sun as the light passes through thin clouds, or from the transmission of light through particles of ice.  It lingers a full quarter of an hour, and then dies away.  Does this bode rough weather?  Surely the cruel Boreas and the frost will not come suddenly on us after this lovely, mild Christmas!  Listen to the Christmas bells ringing two miles away at Barnsley village I we can never tire of the sound here, for it is only on very still days that it reaches us across the wolds.

     “Hark!  In the air, around, above,
        The Angelic Music soars and swells,
      And, in the Garden that I love
        I hear the sound of Christmas Bells.

     “From hamlet, hollow, village, height,
        The silvery Message seems to start,
      And far away its notes to-night
        Are surging through the city’s heart.

     “Assurance clear to those who fret
        O’er vanished Faith and feelings fled,
      That not in English homes is yet
        Tradition dumb, or Reverence dead.

     “Now onward floats the sacred tale,
        Past leafless woodlands, freezing rills;
      It wakes from sleep the silent vale,
        It skims the mere, it scales the hills;

     “And rippling on up rings of space,
        Sounds faint and fainter as more high,
      Till mortal ear no more may trace
        The music homeward to the sky.

     “To courtly roof and rustic cot
        Old comrades wend from far and wide;
      Now is the ancient feud forgot,
        The growing grudge is laid aside.

     “Peace and goodwill ’twixt rich and poor! 
        Goodwill and peace ’twixt class and class! 
      Let old with new, let Prince with boor
        Send round the bowl, and drain the glass!”

      ALFRED AUSTIN.

I have culled these lines from the poet laureate’s charming “Christmas Carol,” as they are both singularly beautiful and singularly appropriate to our Cotswold village.