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Christmas In Wales By Wirt Sikes

The Christmas season in the land of Arthur and Merlin is a season of such earnest and widespread cordiality, such warm enthusiasm, such hearty congratulations between man and man, that I have been nowhere equally impressed with the geniality and joyousness of the time. In some Catholic countries one sees more merriment on the day itself; indeed, the day itself is not especially merry in Wales, at least in its outdoor aspects. It is the season rather than the day which is merry in Wales; and the season is a much longer one than with us in America. The festival is usually understood, throughout Christendom, to include twelve but the Welsh people not only make much of the twelve days, but they extend the peculiar festivities of the season far beyond those limits. Christmas has fairly begun in Wales a week or two before Christmas-day. The waits were patrolling the streets of Cardiff last year as early as December 5th, and Christmas festivals were held as early as December 19th, at which Christmas trees were displayed, and their boughs denuded of the toys, and trinkets, and lollipops in which the juvenile heart delighteth. After Christmas-day the festival continues I know not just how long, but apparently for weeks.

The characteristic diversions of the Christmas season are in the main, alike in all Christian countries. In Wales many curious old customs are retained which in other parts of Great Britain have disappeared, such as the mummers, the waits, carols, bell ringings, etc. Not only do the bell-ringers of the several churches throughout the principality do their handsomest on their own particular bells, but there are grand gatherings at special points of all the bell-ringers for leagues around, who vie with each other in showing what feats they can perform, how they can astonish you with their majors, bob-majors, and triple bob-majors on the brazen clangers of the steeples. At Cowbridge last Christmas thirty-five ringers came together from Aberdare, Penarth, St. Fagans, Llantrisant, Llanblethian, and other still more unpronounceable places, and, after they had rung till the air above the town was black with flying clefs and quavers from the steeples, they all sat down to a jolly Christmas dinner at the Bear. The bands of waits, or " pipers of the watch," who wake the echoes of the early morning with their carols, are heard in every Welsh town and village. In some towns there are several bands and much good-natured rivalry. The universal love of music among the Welsh saves the waits from degenerating into the woe-begone creatures they are in some parts of England, where the custom has that poor degree of life which can be kept in it by shivering clusters of bawling beggars who cannot sing. Regularly organized and trained choirs of Welshmen perambulate the Cambrian country, chanting carols at Christmas-tide, and bands of musicians play who, in many case, would not discredit the finest military orchestras. Carols are sung in both Welsh and English; and, generally, the waits are popular. If their music is not good, they are not tolerated; irate gentlemen attack them savagely, and drive them off. Not exactly that boot-jacks and empty bottles are thrown at them, but they are excoriated in "letters to the editor," in which strong language is hurled at them as intolerable nuisances, ambulatory disturbers of the nights' quiet, and inflicters of suffering upon the innocent. But such cases are rare. The music is almost invariably good, and the effect of the soft strains of melodiously-warbled Welsh coming dreamily to one's ears through the darkness and distance on a winter morning is sweet and soothing to most ears.

In one aspect the Welsh people may be spoken of as, a people whose lives are passed in the indulgence of their love for music and dancing. The air of Wales seems always full of music. In the Christmas season there is an unending succession of concerts and of miscellaneous entertainments, of which music forms a part; while you cannot enter a tap-room where a few are gathered together, without the imminent probability that one or more will break forth in song. By this is not meant a general musical howl, such as is apt to be evoked from a room full of men of any nationality when very much under the influence of the rosy god; but good set songs, with good Welsh or English words to them, executed with respect for their work by the vocalists, and listened to with a like respect by the rest of the company. When an Englishman is drunk he is belligerent; when a Frenchman is drunk he is amorous; when an Italian is drunk he is loquacious; when a Scotchman is drunk he is argumentative; when a German is drunk he is sleepy; when an American is drunk he brags; and when a Welshman is drunk he sings. Sometimes he dances; but he does not do himself credit as a dancer under these circumstances, for when I speak of dancing I do not refer to those wooden paces and inflections which pass for dancing in society, whether in Europe or America, and which are little more than an amiable pretext for bringing in contact human elements which are slow to mix when planted in chairs about a room: I refer to the individual dancing of men who do not dance for the purpose of touching women's hands, or indulging in small talk, but for the purpose of dancing. and who apply themselves seriously and skillfully to their work - to wit, the scientific performance of the jig.

I chanced to pass one evening. in the Christmas-time, at a country inn in a little Carmarthenshire village remote from railways. Certain wanderings through green lanes (and the lanes were still green, although it was cold, mid-winter weather) had brought me to the place at dusk, and, being weary, I had resolved to rest there for the night. Some local festivity of the season had taken place during the day, which had drawn into the village an unusual number of farmer-folk from the immediate neighborhood. After a simple dinner of a chop and a half-pint of cwrw da (good beer), I strolled into what they called the smoke-room, by way of distinguishing it from the tap-room adjoining. It was a plain little room, with high-backed wooden settles against the wall; indeed, the backs reached nearly up to the ceiling, and gave an old-fashioned air of comfort to the room which no amount of gilding and mirrors could possibly impart. Two or three farmers were sitting there drinking their beer and smoking their pipes, and toasting their trouserless shins before the blazing fire. Presently a Welsh harper with his harp entered from outdoors, and, seating himself in a corner of the room, began to tune his instrument. The room quickly filled up with men and women, and the air was soon reeking with tobacco-smoke and music. No drinks but beer and "pop" were indulged in by the company, save that some of the women drank tea; but Bacchus never saw a more genial company. By my side sat a jovial, collier-looking man, with a shock of tousled hair, who presently struck up in a loud, clear baritone a ringing song, which the harp immediately took up and followed. It was evidently a song all present knew, for they listened to the singer with every manifestation of delight, and when the chorus arrived they joined in with a lusty roar, that made the windows rattle. The singer constantly leaned forward in his seat, swaying his body as sang, and placed the palm of his huge right hand against and under the edge of the table before him with an awkward gesture, that seemed absolutely essential to his comfort - as if he were holding himself down in his seat thus, in opposition to an instinctive disposition to rise and dance; and, instead of looking at the company, or at the ceiling, he looked at the table where he was holding to it. I complimented him on his singing when his song was done, which seemed to gratify him very much; he offered to sing the song over again, in English, if I would like; he could sing it in either language equally well, he said. But, before I could ask him to begin, some one else was singing - an English song this time - with words like these:

"Thrice welcome, old Christmas, we greet thee again,
With laughter and innocent mirth in thy train
Let joy fill the heart, and shine on the brow,
While we snatch a sweet kiss 'neath the mistletoe-bough

The mistletoe-bough,
The mistletoe-bough,

We will snatch a sweet kiss 'neath the mistletoe-bough."

This song, although it was warmly applauded, did not bring out the choral talent of the company to any great extent; it was evidently unfamiliar. But it was quite otherwise with another English song, or at least a song in the English language, sung by the lustiest farmer-lad I ever looked upon - a huge, red-faced, frank-looking boy of eighteen or twenty - with a rousing vigor that was really exciting. This was the chorus, first sung in solo by the farmer-lad:

"La-a-and of the Cymro,
Dear land of moi fathurze,
Oi'll be treue - Oi'll be treu-u-ue
To - the - la-a-ahst!"

And stentorian was the roar of the chorus, men and women together, with a heartiness and an emphasis which no words can possibly exaggerate. It was enough to make a man wish his grandfather had been a Welshman just to hear it.

"You see thot shentleman, sur?" asked my collier neighbor, pointing to a youngish man near. "Well, sur, him and me be shildren o' two sisters - iss, two sisters, sur. I be forty-two an' he be thirty."

The youngish man thus indicated seemed to me a character somewhat out of keeping with his surroundings. I bad already been noticing him as a type of Welshman not like the others who filled the room. He was a sternly respectable man in appearance, tall and slim, well-dressed, clean-shaven, wearing a tall hat, under which was a face full of grave refinement; thin lips, firmly pressed together; clear brown eyes; and a manner which forcibly recalled to me a Sunday-school superintendent who flourished in my childhood, and who afterward became a Presbyterian minister. He was a reticent and even a dignified person, was this young Welshman, grave in the extreme, never laughing or indulging in any of the boisterous displays of merriment peculiar to the scene of which he formed a part. A short time before I had addressed him a question, fancying that I might find a more intelligent companion than the others; but he had made me no other response than a grave nod of affirmation, and had immediately walked away, so that I had felt my familiarity in a manner rebuked. The truth was, his mind was preoccupied with a certain weighty matter, whose results I was presently to witness, I now observed that this man was engaged in a whispered conversation with the harper; there was much putting of lips to ears, many nods of comprehension and acquiescence; and then he came to my baritone neighbor, and took him aside into a corner. More whispering in ears, more nods, and then a silence fell upon the assembly, as the vocal collier took off his hat and announced that Mr. Jones would dance a jig.

"Who is Mr. Jones?" thought I.

The music struck up - a wild, lilting tune, full of Terpsichorean inspiration - and then, lo! my tall Sunday-school superintendent handed his hat to the vocal collier, and, jumping into the middle of the floor, began to dance like a madman. It was a strange sight. With a face whose grave earnestness relaxed no whit, with firmly compressed lips and a knitted brow, the serious superintendent shuffled and double-shuffled,and swung and teetered, and flailed the floor with his rattling soles, till the perspiration poured in rivulets down his solemn face. The company was greatly moved; enthusiastic ejaculations in Welsh and English were heard; shouts of approbation and encouragement rose through the tobacco-smoke: and still the serious person danced and danced, ending at last with a wonderful pigeon-wing, and taking his seat exhausted, amid a tremendous roar of applause.

He had seated himself next me; but my previous approaches had been so coldly received that I did not venture to address him again. But he now turned to me, and said, as he gasped for breath:

" 'Pon my word, I never tried it beyond two times or more in my life before histurday - never!"

"Are you tired?" I asked.

"Pw, no!" said he, wiping his face with a red handkerchief. Then, turning full upon me, he grasped my arm with a nervous clutch, and uttered, with the emphasis of a man upon his oath, "Noa, in-DEED!"

Scenes like this are common throughout Wales at the Christmas-time; and they contrast strangely with the austerities of religious observance which are everywhere proceeding. But there is not so wide a chasm between the two as would exist in our country. The best church-members frequently do not deem a little jollity of this sort a hanging matter, and the clergy of Wales are much less austere than with us. There are ministers who can do a double-shuffle themselves if the worst comes to the worst. A worthy pastor in Glamorganshire related to me, with a suspicious degree of relish, a story about two ministers who were once riding through a certain village of Wales on horseback. One was the Rev. Evan Harris, the other a celebrated old preacher named Shenkin Harry. And, as they rode on, Harris noticed his companion's legs twitching curiously on his horse's sides.

"Why, what ails your leg?" he asked.

"Don't you hear the harp," was the reply, "- in the public-house yonder? It makes my old toes crazy for a jig."

But the moral tone of Wales is certainly better, on the whole, than that of most countries - decidedly better than that of Great Britain generally. There is, I know, a prevailing impression quite to the contrary; but it is utterly absurd. It is an impression which has grown, I imagine, out of English injustice to Welshmen in former times, allied to English ignorance in those times concerning this people. Until within the last hundred years, English writers habitually wrote of Wales with contempt and even scurrility. One of the most indecent books I ever came across is an old work in the British Museum describing a tour in Wales, by an author who evidently had never set foot in the country, but who lampooned the people with a coarse and brutal humor, from his garret in Fleet Street, which was no doubt considered "the thing" in his day. In English comic songs we still hear that "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief." At English horse-races, a Welsher is a man who disgraces honor, and is stoned off the course. These things and their like are survivals of the old injustice and ignorance. No longer ago than the present year the assertion was made by a writer in the London Daily Telegraph that Wales and Scotland are the most immoral of her majesty's dominions. Personal observation and the study of statistics quickly teach the inquirer of the superiority of Wales in moral tone over England - I mean more especially among the middle and lower classes, of course, for among the upper ten thousand the moral tone is much the same everywhere. There are more teetotalers in little Wales than in all England; and, while it is doubtless true that the moderate use of light wines and light beer is not incompatible with the highest standards of virtue, it is nevertheless also true that, in countries where spirits and heavy beer are the only popular beverage among the poor, the statistics of teetotalism and of morality will bang together to a nicety. It is beyond dispute that the amount of beer and spirits drunk in Great Britain is enormous - the drunkenness prodigious: some six hundred million dollars a year being thus swallowed, and some two hundred thousand cases of "drunk and disorderly" being brought before the magistrates of England and Wales together, forty thousand of whom are women. But the strange and painful spectacles which so astonish foreigners in the streets of all large English towns, especially of women, staggering along with tottering legs and idiotic gaze, are very seldom seen in Wales. In England they are common.

The Welsh are more decent in their cups: this is itself something on the side of morality. The number of gin-palaces in Wales is small. Beer-houses are numerous, especially in the large towns, where the native Welsh are less predominant than in smaller places; but they are not so numerous as in Glasgow or Manchester. There is a drinking-saloon for every tenth house in Glasgow. In no town of Wales where the Welsh people are in a majority would an average one-tenth as high as this be found. More often seen in Wales than elsewhere are, empty jails and spotless criminal calendars, maiden assize, and judges with white "kids" - for it is customary, when there are no cases for trial, for the sheriff to present the judge with a pair of gloves. In some Welsh counties the number of jailers is habitually greater than the number of prisoners to be tried. If the state of crime is an index to the state of morals in a community, and this is not denied, facts like these speak volumes. And where but in Wales is there a class of working-men, on the collier plane of existence, among whom would have been probable a story like that of the entombed colliers in the Troedrhiw mine last summer? Rough, grimy fellows, belonging to a class which all over the world is credited with the worst traits of the worst classes, these Welsh colliers sang psalms and hymns to cheer their loneliness at intervals during their ten days' imprisonment in the bowels of the earth. The boy who was one of their number repeated some verses he was learning for recitation at a coming Sunday-school anniversary. Thomas Morgan's party, finding themselves suddenly and mysteriously left on dry ground by the receding of the flood about them, knelt in the darkness, and burst forth singing, in Welsh. the hymn:

"In the deep and mighty waters,
No one there can hold my head
But my only Saviour Jesus,
Who was slaughtered in my stead."

There is no pretense that these men were saints, Uncle Toms - they were just samples of their class in Wales. I have never been more thrilled by a small thing than when I saw Isaac Pride step forward on the platform at Pontypridd last summer, at the distribution of prizes to the rescuers by London's lord-mayor, and solemnly hold up before the audience his square pick. He was dirty and coal-begrimed, in his coarse mining-garments, but he stood up before a brilliant and aristocratic assemblage - on a platform where behind him were gathered lords, Sir Knights, and members of Parliament - and raised his pick before his face as an old crusader might have raised his sword, in reverent symbolization of the cross.

No one can live in Wales and not form the opinion that the Welsh are, in truth, an exceptionally moral people; and the nature of their public entertainments throughout the Christmas-time enforces this conclusion. Stendhal's declaration that, in true Biblical countries, religion spoils one day out of seven, destroys the seventh part of possible happiness, would find strong illustration in Wales. It is not my purpose to argue whether the illustration would prove or disprove Stendhal's assertion, though one might fairly ask whether religious people are not, perhaps, as happy in going to church on Sunday as irreligious people are in staying away. Christmas-day in Wales resembles Sunday much more closely than it does with us in America. The railways and omnibuses run only as on Sunday, i.e., very seldom; there are no express-trains to whirl you up to London - only a crawling local train or two, for the accommodation of neighborhood folk. There are church services, not merely in the morning; you may go to church three times a day if you like at the cathedral. Bars and tap-rooms are closed as on Sundays - i.e., they are only permitted to be open from noon till half-past two, and from six till ten in the evening. The theatre and the circus are not allowed to open their doors day nor evening, and the lover of the drama, human or equine, cannot indulge his worldly passion. In short, that amount of toleration which is reluctantly given to the devil in Wales on ordinary days of the year is sternly withdrawn on Christmas-day.

But let it not be supposed that there is any lack of amusement for people who are willing to be amused in a God-fearing manner. Although you cannot go to the theatre or the circus, you can have a wide liberty of choice among oratorios, concerts, examination, exhibitions, eisteddfodau, and other odd diversions. Concerts especially thrive. The halls in which they are held are decorated with ever-greens, and the familiar custom is endowed with a new and special interest by the fact that in Wales it is associated with the ancient Druids, who inhabited this ground before England was, and who viewed the green twigs as the symbols of perennial life. Thus a peculiar poetic grace rests with a custom beautiful in itself, and capable in any land of being poetized by any one poetically inclined, but in Wales habitually and commonly associated with the Druids, whose ancient stone circles and altars are seen in many neighborhoods. A Welsh concert, too, will not infrequently prove to be a far more impressive thing than a mere entertainment furnished forth by hired singers and instrumentation. It often happens that the whole audience will break out in chorus, singing in a way to make the rafters hum. And fancy what such a chorus may chance to be when it is possible the audience may be numbered in thousands, and every man, woman, and child of it able to sing! Some of the halls in which concerts and eisteddfods are held are really enormous; the hall at Carnarvon will accommodate eight thousand people. In Aberdare, last Christmas, nearly four thousand persons paid for admission to hear the oratorio of " Samson " in the old hall whence Caradoc's, famous musical squadron marched on London; and I was assured that nine-tenths of this vast audience were Welsh working-men, with their wives and sweet- hearts. And they could all sing, too, after a fashion. I was at a concert in Pontypridd, a few days later, where a Mr. Tom Williams sung to the harp the Welsh national anthem, "Hen wlad fy nhadau" ("My Ancient Fatherland"), and the whole audience joined in the chorus like one man. The author of the anthem, a venerable Welshman of Pontypridd, was at the concert, and sang with the rest, so my neighbor told me. He was a very enthusiastic person, by-the-way, my neighbor; a dry, sallow, dark--haired Cymro of fifty, who, in spite of my repeated assurances that I could not understand him, persisted in dropping into Welsh in a friendly way in his remarks to me. But he was so absorbed in his enthusiasms that I suspect his remarks, while addressed ostensibly to me, partook largely of the nature of rhapsody, and were addressed to the gods, or his inner consciousness. He did not seem at all surprised when, as we parted, I ludicrously answered his "Nos da" with "Bonsoir."

On Christmas-day many of those unique gatherings called eisteddfodau are held in different parts of the principality, when poetry, music, and essays, in Welsh and in English, are put forth by the strivers, in these Olympian games of intellect and culture, after the prizes which in Hellas would have given them crowns of olive-leaves instead of gold-coins of the realm. When Pindar and Sophocles handed in poems, and Herodotus competed among the essayists, and Phidias and Praxiteles among the cutters of stone, there was no Christmas, but there were eisteddfodau here in Wales; ay, and before that, for Herodotus has himself spoken of the British bards who held them. A smaller sort of eisteddfod - the infant, so to speak, or bud of the full-grown, full-blown thing - also lifts its voice on the evening air of Christmas for our entertainment, if poetry, essay, song, and recitation, will entertain us. It is possible we may be too blasé, or our tastes too exotic, for all this. Then we have naught to do but go to our beds and dream of the coarser joys of boxing-night.

But in the family circle, the rules which regulate the Sabbath in Wales - which are almost as repressive as those of bonnie Scotland, where, by-the-way, Christmas-day is scarcely observed at all - these stern rules are relaxed, and the aspect of the home is as bright as can be. The rooms are elaborately decorated with flowers and evergreens, holly and ivy, ferns and rare plants. In Glamorganshire, and other of the southern counties looking on the sea, roses and hawthorn-sprays may be sometimes seen in full bloom out-of-doors at Christmas. The grass and leaves are green and plentiful in fields and garden-parks the whole year round. Indeed, so rare is a cold snap at Christmas that its arrival is looked upon quite in the light of a luxury; nothing so serves to intensify the happiness around the hearth-stone as the knowledge that the weather outdoors is bleak. People congratulate each other on it. "Fine, seasonable weather," they say, ruddy with satisfaction over the fact, parting their coat-tails before or holding out their hands to the flaming coal-fire which leaps and dances in the grate.

The Welsh poor are really in clover at the Christmas-time. They are never neglected then, no matter what their lot at other seasons. The outdoor poor of every parish are visited with the baskets of benefaction in the hands of the well-to-do. A species of festivity, arbitrarily termed a "tea and treat," at which all poor people may come and sit down who will, is spread in Wesleyan chapels and like places. The Wesleyans do not adorn their places of worship with flowers and evergreens, but they spread these tables for the poor with most liberal hand. Whatever meats are left over, after all have eaten who will, are given in baskets to those who ask for them. There is no distinction made in the matter of religion - enough that you are hungry; it is the Christmas-day: eat and be filled. So, seven hundred people ate a Christmas-dinner - for such it was - at the Wesleyan chapel near my home in Cardiff last Christmas. In the mining town of Merthyr Tydfil they give a Christmas-dinner to the poor, which is perhaps the best patronized in Wales. For seventeen years past, the rector of Merthyr tells me, they have never dined fewer than two thousand people at their Christmas-table.

But nowhere are we more jolly than in the infirmaries and the workhouses. You should but see us there! If Christmas is a merry day nowhere else in the wide world, be sure it will be merry in a Welsh workhouse. For then are our bare walls hung thick with the holly and the hawthorn, with cedar and with ivy, with ferns and with flowers, nor is the mistletoe forgotten in its appropriate place, handy to be kissed under. Wherever else that old custom of kissing under the mistletoe may have gone out - and I hear it is going out everywhere among quality-folk - it is not gone out among the Welsh poor, whether paupers or independents. And at one o'clock, in the poor-house, we sit down to the one luxurious feast of the year - our jolly Christmas-dinner - where there be soups of a savoriness to put an appetite under the ribs of death, and joints of a size and a fragrance to stir a fever in the blood of age, not to speak of steaming plum-puddings that would warm the cockles of a mummy's heart, and good old ale that would soften the bosom of a Bashi-Bazouk. Then, after dinner, well - fun is no word for it! The pauper who plays the harp is installed in state, and the pauper who plays the fiddle is established by his side, and they are allowed to display their gifts, and the afternoon and evening are passed in dancing and in singing songs and choruses. The pauper who writes poetry (are we not in the land of the bards?) now comes out strong. His name, surprising to relate, is Jones; and his lines, or some of them, are these, sung to the tune of "The Banks of Dee:"

"What joy in Wales when Christmas is comin',
Roast-beef and plum-puddin' in plenty is there
The girls are a-singin' and old folks rejoicin',
For the guardi'ns have taken their burden o' care!
Thousan's o' gold an' silver in coffer,
An copper' 'out number there be in the land.
Lon'on she boasts o' her banks an' her money,
Forgettin' the poor that lives by the Strand.

CHORUS.

Oh! if every union, all through the kingdom,
Would give such a welcome as Cardiff do give
Roast-beef an' plum-puddin', cake and tea for old women;
Now we're rejoicin' - sing 'God save the Queen!'"

A little lame in the matter of sequence, but pauper poetry is not to be viewed with the stern eyes of yr eisteddfod. What abundance reigns at one of these pauper-dinners you may guess when I mention that for the dinner at Merthyr workhouse last Christmas were provided four hundred pounds of beef, four hundred pounds of potatoes, eighteen plum-puddings, weighing over five hundred pounds, and so on, besides ale, tobacco, pipes, and snuff galore. Judging only by our glimpse of it to-day, we should imagine life in a Welsh workhouse to be anything but the gloomy existence one usually associates with such institutions. However, the life is no more popular here than in other parts of Great Britain and the United States; where, as we know, men and women will generally go very close to starvation ere they will accept the workhouse shelter. Partly this is due to the hatred of discipline, the love of one's freedom, but largely, also, it is due to a decent pride, a manly self-respect. Though the workhouse may be fairly full at the Christmas season, in summer you will find it nearly empty of all except cripples and idiots.

The British boxing-night is well known. It exists in Wales, of course, but the truth is, the theatre-going class in Wales is extremely limited. The theatre fills no place at all in the life of the better classes. Society knows it not; the vast majority of the religionists taboo it; its regular patrons are the lower orders. There are, of course, individuals who form the exception to the rule, who, while belonging to society or to the church, still have a taste for this sort of amusement, and seek to gratify it occasionally. They are generally sorry they went, for the performance is seldom good. It could hardly be expected to be good with the feeble support it receives from the public. There are but four towns in Wales which have any place they call a theatre - Cardiff, Swansea Newport, and Brecon - all in South Wales, it will be noticed. North Wales has none, nor even a "music-hall," a place of entertainment like that which we call a "variety theatre" in America, except that drinking and smoking go on in the auditorium. Nevertheless, the Christmas pantomimes on boxing-night (December 26th) are full of ingenious features, in which local peculiarities are often brought out; and the theatres are packed on this night, if on no other of the year, to witness the delights of a piece with some such portentous name as "Jack and Jill," Harlequin Robin Hood," "The Pretty Prince," "The Happy King and the Fairies of the Gold and Silver Dell." A Christmas pantomime without a long name would be looked upon as just no pantomime at all. And, correctly speaking, the British thing is not a pantomime at all, be its name what it may, for a pantomime, as we understand it in America, and as it is understood in France, whence it came hither, is a play in dumb-show, of course. But the British diversion called a pantomime is, in fact, a burlesque, with songs, jigs, and doggerel dialogue throughout two-thirds of it, and a harlequinade of a sort so coarse that it is frankly termed a "spill and pelt," for the closing third, in which the clown keeps up an incessant chattering. Of course, this is not pantomime, but English opinion would, no doubt hold that a pantomime is anything an Englishman chooses to call such - for surely the English may be permitted to know their own language best? This logic has been so severely turned against our Americanisms in speech, that I guess it is as fair to say a clever man is smart as that a noisy burlesque is a pantomime. There is a marked catering, in the doggerel of the first part, to the tastes of the working-classes. This is natural, as the house is filled with working-men and servants. They not only occupy the gallery and the pit - for the pit is an institution which still holds its own in Welsh theatres, precisely as it did fifty years ago - but they also fill the boxes and the dress-circle. As I have said, society never goes to the theatre in Wales, so that the dress-circle is rather a misnomer. Generally it is empty. or has a few young men about town lounging in it in lonely fashion. On boxing-night it is occupied by the lower orders. The pit takes up the space which in Snowdon theatres is sacred to the orchestra-stalls - i.e., the best seats in the house. In London theatres there is a sort of pit, but it is behind the velvet field of the luxurious orchestra-stalls, at the back of the theatre, under the overhanging balcony, and almost in darkness. The Welsh pit is more primitive, and its presence is one great bar to the prosperity of the drama in Wales, where it will never flourish until this relic of a past age is moved back out of sight of the fastidious.

But there are no fastidious here tonight. The audience is made up not merely of working men and women, but of the roughest sort of these - the sort who do not care so much for eisteddfodau and oratorios, concerts and lectures, as they do for a couplet from the bright-red lips of a stage fairy in pink tights and a yellow wig.

"Times may be bad now, but I 'ope they will mend,
And the year that's to come prove the working-man's friend!

utters the fairy, and then the wicked baron, Grumblegriffin, asks for a sign of the same; whereupon the fairy waves her silver wand and discloses a scene of "Landore as it ought to be" - nothing more nor less than a representation of Landore steel-works, with the ruddylight of the forge glowing through its windows, clouds of smoke rolling from its tall chimneys, and sounds of the clang of hammers and the rattle of machinery coming from behind scenes. What roars of enthusiasm greet this, at the hands of working-men who know that Landore works are closed on account of dull times, it were idle to tell.

If society goes out at all on boxing-night in Wales, it goes to a full-dress concert, with artists of a high order, and all that delightful, dressy, floral, perfumed flutter which in London centres about the opera. A full-dress concert is indeed the highest public expression of the upper-ten's existence that is seen in Christmas-time outside the churches. Usually, it is on behalf of some charity, or military organization, and is patronized quite as much on that account as because of the merit of the performance - though among the artists may be some of the most celebrated in Europe - Santley, Sims Reeves, or the like. The lamented Titiens was long a special favorite in Wales. The centre of the hall was set apart as the "reserved full-dress circle" at such a concert I once attended in the little town of Cowbridge. The hall was a rustic assembly-room - the smallest of town-halls - a dozen single gas-jets served to light it; but it was large enough for the town - the queer, quaint, little old town of Cowbridge - and the "full-dress circle" thereof contained aristocrats of the bluest blood, the most high-toned noses, the most delightful manners, who could trace their lineage straight back to William the Conqueror's Norman knights. Save on some such occasion as this, the gentlefolk in Wales amuse themselves very little in the public eye. They have their fox-hunting, of course - an amusement which usually draws many spectators during the Christmas holidays to witness the meet. In Carmarthen they have an annual Christmas custom of leading the Maesgwynne hounds into the Guildhall Square, whence a run is made. But usually the gentry find their Christmas amusements at home, and what grand and beautiful homes some of them are! The most magnificent banquet I ever attended was a private dinner in a certain Welsh castle that shall here be nameless; and I have not only some of the most elegant dinners of London and Paris to compare it with, but also a Chicago game-dinner of fifty dishes to which I once sat down; and comparison can no further go. The Welsh dinner distanced them all: it was an expression of the limit of civilization in this direction - a dinner not merely provided by vast wealth, quite careless of cost, but adorned with luxurious piles of the rarest exotics grown in my host's conservatory, and including pheasants shot on the estate, and great pineapples, oranges, peaches, the most luscious grapes, fruit of the rarest perfection and in profuse abundance, all reared in the hot-houses belonging to the castle, and served by men whose ancestors had been servants under the same roof.

I have not dwelt on the church features of the Welsh Christmas, because they are mainly as at home. It is true, there is in them more earnestness and enthusiasm; the decorations of the established church edifices, and especially of the cathedrals, are more extensive, expensive, and elaborate; and there are more frequent services, not only on Christmas--day, but throughout the season. It is a sight to behold, the preparations for and the work of decorating a vast pile of ecclesiastical buildings like Llandaff Cathedral - the huge quantities of evergreens and holly, flowers, cedars, etc., which are day by day accumulated by the ladies who have the business in charge; and the slow, continual growth of forms of grace-arches, crosses, wreaths, festoons; green coverings to font, altar, pulpit, choir-stalls, pillars, reredos, and rood-screen: panels faced with scarlet cloth bearing sacred devices worked in evergreen; the very window-sills glowing with banks of color - until all the wide spaces in chancel, nave, and transepts, are adorned. In some instances, apples and other hardy fruits are freely used in the decorations. Within the past year or two the custom of having midnight services and bell-ringings in the closing hours of the old year has come in vogue; and an ancient Welsh carol called "Mae'r flwyddyn yn marw" ("The Old Year is dying") has been revived :

"The old year is dying fast, dying away,
A dull, cloudy sunset has closed its last day;
The night-winds are sighing, the last hour is fled
The bells are all tolling - the old year is dead!"

A custom prevailing in Pembrokeshire on New-Year's-morning is quaint and interesting. As soon as it is light children of the peasantry hasten to provide a small cup of pure spring-water, just from the well, and go about sprinkling the faces of those they meet, with the aid of a sprig of evergreen. At the same time they sing the following verses .

"Here we bring new water from the well so clear,
For to worship God with, this happy new year;
Sing levy dew, sing levy dew, the water and the wine,
With seven bright gold wires, and bugles that do shine;
Sing reign of fair maid, with gold upon her toe;
Open you the west door and turn the old year go;
Sing reign of fair maid, with gold upon her chin .
Open you the east door and let the new year in!"

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