Book 2 - Chapter 2 - Page 2

chant had helped as usual to lift the morning above the level of
common days; and then there were the smell of hot toast and ale from
the kitchen, at the breakfast hour; the favorite anthem, the green
boughs, and the short sermon gave the appropriate festal character to
the church-going; and aunt and uncle Moss, with all their seven
children, were looking like so many reflectors of the bright
parlor-fire, when the church-goers came back, stamping the snow from
their feet. The plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as
ever, and came in with the symbolic blue flames around it, as if it
had been heroically snatched from the nether fires, into which it had
been thrown by dyspeptic Puritans; the dessert was as splendid as
ever, with its golden oranges, brown nuts, and the crystalline light
and dark of apple-jelly and damson cheese; in all these things
Christmas was as it had always been since Tom could remember; it was
only distinguished, it by anything, by superior sliding and snowballs.

Christmas was cheery, but not so Mr. Tulliver. He was irate and
defiant; and Tom, though he espoused his father's quarrels and shared
his father's sense of injury, was not without some of the feeling that
oppressed Maggie when Mr. Tulliver got louder and more angry in
narration and assertion with the increased leisure of dessert. The
attention that Tom might have concentrated on his nuts and wine was
distracted by a sense that there were rascally enemies in the world,
and that the business of grown-up life could hardly be conducted
without a good deal of quarrelling. Now, Tom was not fond of
quarrelling, unless it could soon be put an end to by a fair stand-up
fight with an adversary whom he had every chance of thrashing; and his
father's irritable talk made him uncomfortable, though he never
accounted to himself for the feeling, or conceived the notion that his
father was faulty in this respect.

The particular embodiment of the evil principle now exciting Mr.
Tulliver's determined resistance was Mr. Pivart, who, having lands
higher up the Ripple, was taking measures for their irrigation, which
either were, or would be, or were bound to be (on the principle that
water was water), an infringement on Mr. Tulliver's legitimate share
of water-power. Dix, who had a mill on the stream, was a feeble
auxiliary of Old Harry compared with Pivart. Dix had been brought to
his senses by arbitration, and Wakem's advice had not carried _him_
far. No; Dix, Mr. Tulliver considered, had been as good as nowhere in
point of law; and in the intensity of his indignation against Pivart,
his contempt for a baffled adversary like Dix began to wear the air of
a friendly attachment. He had no male audience to-day except Mr. Moss,