Christmas stands for much, and for more and more in a world that is breaking down its barriers of race and religious intolerance, and one of its chief offices has been supposed to be the teaching of men the pleasure there is in getting rid of some of their possessions for the benefit of others.  But this frittering away a good instinct and tendency in conventional giving of manufactures made to suit an artificial condition is hardly in the line of developing the spirit that shares the last crust or gives to the thirsty companion in the desert the first pull at the canteen.  Of course Christmas feeling is the life of trade and all that, and we will be the last to discourage any sort of giving, for one can scarcely disencumber himself of anything in his passage through this world and not be benefited; but the hint may not be thrown away that one will personally get more satisfaction out of his periodic or continual benevolence if he gives during his life the things which he wants and other people need, and reserves for a fine show in his will a collected but not selected mass of holiday goods.

CLIMATE AND HAPPINESS

The idea of the relation of climate to happiness is modern.  It is probably born of the telegraph and of the possibility of rapid travel, and it is more disturbing to serenity of mind than any other.  Providence had so ordered it that if we sat still in almost any region of the globe except the tropics we would have, in course of the year, almost all the kinds of climate that exist.  The ancient societies did not trouble themselves about the matter; they froze or thawed, were hot or cold, as it pleased the gods.  They did not think of fleeing from winter any more than from the summer solstice, and consequently they enjoyed a certain contentment of mind that is absent from modern life.  We are more intelligent, and therefore more discontented and unhappy.  We are always trying to escape winter when we are not trying to escape summer.  We are half the time ‘in transitu’, flying hither and thither, craving that exact adaptation of the weather to our whimsical bodies promised only to the saints who seek a “better country.”  There are places, to be sure, where nature is in a sort of equilibrium, but usually those are places where we can neither make money nor spend it to our satisfaction.  They lack either any stimulus to ambition or a historic association, and we soon find that the mind insists upon being cared for quite as much as the body.

How many wanderers in the past winter left comfortable homes in the United States to seek a mild climate!  Did they find it in the sleet and bone-piercing cold of Paris, or anywhere in France, where the wolves were forced to come into the villages in the hope of picking up a tender child?  If they traveled farther, were the railway carriages anything but refrigerators tempered by cans of cooling water?  Was there a place in Europe from Spain to Greece, where the American