From "A Christmas Tree": I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers, and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves, and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being wound up) dangling from innumerable twigs, there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping, there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men -- and no wonder, for their heads took off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plums, there were fiddles and drums. . . .