Fiom THE "NORTH-CHINA DAILY NEWS" or DECEMBER 25, 1878
While, as in duty bound, we wish our readers "A Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year," we feel that these annual salutations are gradually losing much of their old meaning. They are sinking into the category of courteous forms, for no better reason than that we are learning to live so terribly in earnest that merriment has become as it were an unclean thing, and prosperity has acquired the meaning of victory in the struggle for precedence. Worse than this, children them! Selves are beginning to take a serious view of existence, such as ought to be postponed for many a year to come. They are old men and women before their time, and a Christmas article cannot be better expended than in protesting against such unnatural pre-cecity. It is true that now, as heretofore, the close of the year brings with it charity and hospitality, gatherings together of old friends, and thoughtful provision for the wants of those whose have fallen in dificult places. But we miss the mirth and gaiety of early times when the approach of Christmas-tide turned old people young, and force young people into ecstasies of delighted "anticipation. We have the eating and drinking, the songs and toasts, the evergreen' wreaths and the sacred mistletoe, but the fun and frolic are as extinct as the mastodon or the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.