CHAPTER XIV - WHEN SHALL THESE THREE MEET AGAIN?
CHRISTMAS EVE in Cloisterham. A few strange faces in the streets;
a few other faces, half strange and half familiar, once the faces
of Cloisterham children, now the faces of men and women who come
back from the outer world at long intervals to find the city
wonderfully shrunken in size, as if it had not washed by any means
well in the meanwhile. To these, the striking of the Cathedral
clock, and the cawing of the rooks from the Cathedral tower, are
like voices of their nursery time. To such as these, it has
happened in their dying hours afar off, that they have imagined
their chamber-floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves fallen
from the elm-trees in the Close: so have the rustling sounds and
fresh scents of their earliest impressions revived when the circle
of their lives was very nearly traced, and the beginning and the
end were drawing close together.
Seasonable tokens are about. Red berries shine here and there in
the lattices of Minor Canon Corner; Mr. and Mrs. Tope are daintily
sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the
Cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the coat-
button-holes of the Dean and Chapter. Lavish profusion is in the
shops: particularly in the articles of currants, raisins, spices,
candied peel, and moist sugar. An unusual air of gallantry and
dissipation is abroad; evinced in an immense bunch of mistletoe
hanging in the greengrocer's shop doorway, and a poor little
Twelfth Cake, culminating in the figure of a Harlequin - such a
very poor little Twelfth Cake, that one would rather called it a
Twenty-fourth Cake or a Forty-eighth Cake - to be raffled for at
the pastrycook's, terms one shilling per member.
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