The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1887-12-10 00:00:00

The contrast between these two symbolical
fi;,uees as conimenly represented is certainly
s' liking enough. While Father Time is
d ;pieted as an old man quite bald, with the
e.eeeetion of a lock of hair on the forehead,
thin in the face and spare in the body,
I' ether Christmas is always pictured as a
b n rivan of the Falstaffian type, with a
jelly, ruddy-hued round face, and his
ahandant hoary hair crowned with a circlet'
of holly leaves glossy and green. In
pictorial representations each New Yea:
takes the form of an infant—crowing in the
cradle of course—as precocity must naturally
atrach to the latest-born child of Father
Time, and therefore the year that is drawing
to a close may appropriately be depicted in
the similitude of a man, 'full of days, and
wearing a coloured nightcap for head gear.
Weeks have formed the separate stages, in
his progress from childhood to old age, as
centuries do in the unresting course of time.
With the glow of 'he December fire, to
which he has drawn near, falling full on his
face, and making it send forth a reflected
glow, the Old Year dwells with pleasure
on the circumstance that, though the wintry
landscapes are now bleak and cheerless to
the eye in the brief daylight, there was a
glorious summer, with abundance of sun-
shine, which gladdened the heart of man.
He has consolation in thinking that if the
flowers are now faded, they were perfect in
beauty when they basked in the refulgence
of the past season, and that, if the feathered
songsters are now dumb, they filled the
woodlands with their rapturous carollings
when the leaves of the trees were emerald
green and the skies above them were
ethereally blue. The long drought, indeed,
put the dwellers of some towns and districts
of the country in great straits for a sufficient
water supply, and a (elms of Adam's wine
,
was more precious to them than the finest
flavoured Burgundy or sparkling cham-
pagne; but compensation is a balancing law
of nature, and the Continuous dry weather,
besides rejoicing the hearts of thousands who
found opportunities for recreating them-
selves under the conopy of heaven, made
perspiring cricketers feel that they were in
clover, though the scorched grass under
their feet wore a brown tint assimilating it
to moss. If farmers had cause to complain
about the want of refreshing showers for
their pastures in the hottest of the summer
months, they were ready enough to
acknowledge when reaping operations were
completed that the harvest yield exceeded
their expectations. Over and above all the
other events which have occurred since the
first day of January, so far as our own
country is concerned, old Eighteen Hundred
and Eighty-seven, whose name-number is
destined to hold a memorable place in British
history, will naturally feel most gratified in
his retrospective fireside meditations at the
loyalty and enthusiasm which characterised
the Jubilee celebrations throughout the
length and breadth of the land, and in the
remotest colonies under the sovereignty of
the Crown. Nothing at all comparable to
these celebrations in the vastness of their
compass had ever previously occurred in
the history of any nation in the world.
It was an auspicious circumstance that the
first Colonial Conference intended to pro-
mote the solidarity of the Empire, and to
devise measures for securing the safety of its
widely-separared communities assembled in
London on the golden year of the Royal
Jubilee. That conference, with its strong
muster of representative delegates from our
kin beyond sea in all parts of the earth,
serve to show in a strikingly impressive
manner the marvellous progress which the
chief colonies entrusted with self-goverment
have made during the fifty years of the
Queen's reign. The presence in the
metropolis of representatives from our
Eastern Empire who assisted in the Jubilee
celebrations also testified to the beneficent
results of British rule in India in the
Victorian age. Apart from the political
questions, which have excited controversy
both in and out of Parliament, and the most
momentous of which still forms the subject
of heated discussion, the byegone months,
with the lights and shadows of their crowded
mixed events, have afforded abundant
materials for retrospective meditation. But
the Old Year, with the reflective December
nightcap on kis head, has still a few weeks
to live, and the pleasant prospect lies before
him of hobnobbing with festive Father
Christmas, and warming the thin current of
blood in his blue veins ere he bids adieu for
over to this terrestrial sphere.