pan Dee. 25.
By the time this morning awakens the reader the wish appropriate to the day has been "so often expressed in advance that it may seem superfluous to give it further expression. This age of emphasis does not permit any season, much less Christmas, to come unheralded. The man who spent his summer holidays giving the finishing touches to the story or sketch for the Christmas number of such and such a magazine, the shopkeeper who finds that the -Noeltide scene in his window is showing all the signs of a couple of months' wear, and, above all, the maker of mince-pies who has "been giving other people happy months with assiduous altruism, might be forgiven if, -to them; the formula took the words "A Merry Christmas: thank heaven it's over." Yet they do not seek such indulgence. To-day, however much there haz "been of this craze for anticipat tion, the arrival of the real genuine simon pure—Christmas Dag itself—is hailed by all.
Even journalists can venture to be carefree to-day. They -know, of course, that they will pay for it a couple of days hhence—who cares for aftermaths at Christmas time, anyway? For compression, ruthless suppression and other methods of fitting the paper to its Procrustean bed will be the Penalties of the two. days' holiday. Til then it is permissible to enter fully into the joys of this festal period. And newspapers do at least a service which, perhaps, will be ap. preciated this year more gratefully than usual. They refrain from publishing news tending to mar the celebrations. Indeed. they publish no news at all. So, whether silver mounts to some giddy height or descends yet deeper to the ignominious nadir in which it seems determined to wallow, no hint of the fact witl disturb the merriment of Shanghai folk.
Christmas mightily renders mankind this tribute: it inculeates the virtue of hopefulness; it points the way to Yejection of the sorrowful load of human failures. For if, at any given moment, Man can throw off his burden, call it of no account, aught at it, tell it to rest there till he deigns to pick it up again, then he intimates to the attendant gods—or who ever be the controlling powers, around him—that he is of good heart, that he is not to be brow-beaten by disaster and that, in the circumstances, it is better to humour rather than irritate him with doleful encumbrances.
So Christmas really is the spirit of the Bold Front. It practises all in the pleasant fortitude of cheerfulness. It braces every man and every woman-for the travail which is bound to ahead. Incidentally it provides inspiration for comfort uring the gloomier passages, just as it imperatively _insis on joyful celebration under its} immediate influence.- So that i: why without more ado, or beating' about the bush or delaying the Printer who, strangely for one of such devilish habits, insists on his Christmas holiday, too, and wants to Jock up the forme, the readers' of this journal are to-day desired to accept the good old wish: "A Merry Christ-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.