PART II

I

TWO OTHER WINTER SNOWBIRDS AT A WINDOW

"Do you see them coming, Elizabeth?"

"Not yet--except in my mind's eye."

"Your mind's eye! Always that mind's eye! Till you see them with something better than your mind's eye, don't disturb me, Elizabeth. I have just come to the Battle of Hastings. I am going to fight as King Harold. Old William the Conqueror has just finished saying his hypocritical prayers. I am arming for him!"

"Arm away!" said Elizabeth, never interested in arming.

She stood at the sunny window of the library. With one rosy finger-nail she had scratched some frost off a window-pane, and with her face close to the clear spot was peeping out. Her fingers tapped a contented ditty on the window-sill.

A few minutes later the other voice was heard again: it came from the direction of a sofa in the room, and seemed to rise out of half-smothering cushions:--

"While the battle is going on, you might look around once more for the key, Elizabeth. Likely enough they have it hid somewhere in here. They got the Tree into the house last night without our catching them. And after they think we are asleep to-night, they'll hang the presents on, and to-morrow they'll pretend they didn't. But we can't let them go on treating us like infants, or as if we were no better than immigrants. That's what little immigrants believe! And that's how we got the notion in this country. Old William was an immigrant! But I wouldn't loathe him as I do if he hadn't been one of the hypocritical praying immigrants. He could have prayed without being a hypocrite, Elizabeth; and he could have been a hypocrite without praying; but he wanted to be both, the old beast!"

"But he stopped praying centuries ago, Harold," said Elizabeth, rubbing her long nose against the window-pane as though she had a mind to shorten it on a grindstone. "Can't you find enough in the world to fight without going away back to fight William the Conqueror? What have we Kentucky children got to do with William the Conqueror on Christmas Eve! And suppose he was a hypocrite then; he can't be a hypocrite _now_! If he went where it's nicest to go, it must have been taken out of him by this time; and if he went where they say it is not so nice, O dear! of course, I don't know what became of it _there_; it may have exploded; it may have blown him up." Elizabeth had begun her earliest study of chemistry; she disliked explosive gases.

A few minutes later the deliberate voice rose out of the sofa pillows:--

"I wish it had been me to turn the heat on him: I'd have made him sizzle! If you find the key, lay it aside quietly, Elizabeth. By that time the moon may be shining down on the battle-field where I am dead among my common soldiers, all of us covered with gore: let the king lie there with them as one of them: doesn't that sound fine?"

"Not to me!" said Elizabeth. "It sounds like nonsense: what's the matter with _your_ mind's eye, I beg to inquire?"

Elizabeth was nondescript. Her hair was golden-red and as soft as woven wind. Her skin had the fairness of peach bloom when bees are coming and going in the sunlit air and there is such sweetness. Under her eyes lay a deeper flush like that sometimes seen on a child's face after a first day's sunburn by the waterside in springtime. Her own face might have been called the face of four crescents. Two of the crescents you always saw--her eyebrows, twin down-curved bands of palest gold. In order to see the other crescents, you had only to tell Elizabeth some story. As you finished, she who had been leaning over toward you slowly closed her eyes and drew in a breath as though to drink the last delight of it; her thin lips parted tightly across her pointed little teeth in a smile of thanks; and then in each cheek a curved dimple came out, shaped like what the farmers in Elizabeth's country call "a dry moon" when it appears thus set up on end in the evening sky--the water for the month having all run out.

Elizabeth's nose did not appear to have originated in the New World, but to be one of those steep Lombard noses, which on the faces of northern Italians seem to have started down the Alps in a landslide, to have gone a certain distance toward the Mediterranean, and then suddenly to have disappeared over the precipice of the chin. Across the Alpine nose was stretched a tiny spiderweb golden bridge: Elizabeth wore spectacles. The frames were of the palest gold--she insisted they must be the exact color of her eyebrows.

It was the glasses perhaps that gave to her face its look of dreaminess. But there were times when her eyes pained. (All the doctors had never been able to keep them from paining.) And this often compelled her to sit with them closed and do nothing; then her face became dreamier. But always the look bespoke an introspection of happiness. It drew your mind back to the work of those unknown artisans of Tanagra, who centuries before our era expressed in little terra-cotta figures the freedom and joy of Greek children in the old Greek life. Whatever the children are doing, they are happy about it; if they are doing nothing, they are happy about doing nothing.

Thus, as long as Elizabeth's eyes were open on the world, they found the things that made her happy, neglecting the rest. No psyche winging the wide plain ever went more surely to its needed blossom, disregarding otherwise the crowded acres. And when her tired eyes were closed and the golden bridge was lifted off the Lombard nose, they were opened upon an inner world as enchanting. For with that gift which belongs to childhood and to genius alone, as the real things of life which she had loved disappeared, she caught them alive and transferred them to another land. There also she kept all the other beautiful things that had never been real on the earth but ought to have been real, as she insisted; and on these Elysian Fields her spirit went to play. She was already old enough to realize that she was constantly outgrowing things; but as they were borne backward into the distance she turned and laid her fingers on her lips in farewell to them--little Niobe of unshed tears over life's changes. Her soul seemed to be this, that she could not turn against anything she once had loved, nor cease to be loyal to it after it was ruined or gone. As a swallow remembers the eaves whether the skies be bright or dark, the nature of Elizabeth sheltered itself under the old world's roof of love.

It was this intense fidelity of character that now kept her in her watch at the window, waiting for the two friends who were to make them four children on Christmas Eve. Once, indeed, as no figures were to be seen far or near out on the winter landscape, she turned softly into the room, and much against her will continued her search for the key that would unlock the doors connecting the library with the parlor--the dark and suddenly mysterious parlor where the Christmas Tree now stood.

There was a mingling of three odors in the library that forenoon. Into one wall an old white marble mantel-piece was built, decorated on each side with huge bunches of grapes--a votive offering by Bacchus, god of the inner fire, to Pluto, god of the outer fire. This mantel now held in its heart a crimson glow of anthracite coals; and the wintry smell of coal gas was comfortably pervasive. Making its summer-like way through the gas was the fragrance of rose geranium, some pots of which were blooming on a window-sill just inside the silvery landscapes of frost. A third and more powerful odor was that of a bruised evergreen, boughs of which had been crushed in handling, and the sap of which, oozing from the trunk, scattered far its wild balsam: the fragrance ever suggested the fir in the next room.

Elizabeth went first to the mantel, and putting one little freckled hand on the Parian marble, and a little freckled (perhaps) foot on the brass fender, and pressing her side against the Bacchic grapes (which might well have become purpling at the moment), she opened the clock and looked in. The clock key was there, and Elizabeth was used to see her mother take it out for the winding of the hours--always the winding of the hours, the winding of the years, the winding of life.

Next she went to another window where the geraniums were blooming, and looked on the sill: these geraniums were her mother's especial care, as everything in the house was her especial care; and Elizabeth had often watched her pouring water on the budding green of the plants as though the drops were bright tears: once she believed the bright drops were tears.

Then she passed on to the locked connecting doors between the library and the parlor, sniffing as she drew near the odor of the fir--sniffing it with sensitive nostril as a fawn on some wild mountain-side questions the breeze blowing from beds of inaccessible herbage. Every spring when the parlor was locked for cleaning and when children's feet and fingers must be kept from wet paint, she was used to see her mother lock these doors and lay the key along the edge of the carpet. It was not there now, however.

Then Elizabeth looked in one more place.

The library had shelves along one wall reaching from the floor well up toward the ceiling in the old Southern way. Filling the shelves at one end were the older books of the house, showing the good but narrow taste of a Southern household in former times. Midway, the modern books were massed, ranging through part of the world's classic literature and through no little of the world's new science; and so marking a transition in culture to the present master and mistress. At the other end of the shelves there was a children's corner of the world's best fairy tales, some English, some German, some Scandinavian--most of them written for little people where winters are long and snows deep and pine forests boundless.

She went to the shelf where the day before she had observed her mother put a book back into its place: the book was there, but no key. So she passed along the shelves back toward the window, where she maintained her lookout; and she trailed her finger-tips along the backs of the books as she passed the children's corner of fairy tales: it was a habit of hers to caress things she was fond of as long as they remained within reach. Once her hand almost touched the key where it lay hidden--among those old-time Christmas stories.

Half glad that her search had been in vain, she returned to her vigil at the window.

"Did you find the key?"

"No; and I'm not sorry I didn't." And then she suddenly cried: "They are coming, Harold! I see them away off on the hilltop yonder, running and jumping."

The boy sat up on the edge of the sofa. He had on a suit of cassimere of a kind of blue-limestone gray as though the rock of the land had been used as a dye; and the brass buttons of his jacket marked him as a member of some military institute, which had released him for the holidays. He laid aside his Book of the World's Great Battles, and put the hair out of his eyes. They had the bold keenness of a hawk's; and his profile was as sharply cut as though it had been chipped along the edge of a white flint.

Any historian of the main stock of our early American people would have fixed curious eyes on him. Merely to behold him was to think backward across oceans and ages to a race emerging into notice along the coast of the yellow-surging North Sea: known already to their historians for straight blond hair falling over bluish gray eyes; large bodies with shapely white limbs; braggart voices, arrogant tempers; play-loving and fight-loving dispositions; ingrained honor and valor: their animal natures rooted in attachment to their country; and their spiritual natures soaring away toward an ideal of truth and strength set somewhere in a heaven. He was an offshoot of this old race, breeding stubbornly true on these late Kentucky fields.

"They are coming! They are coming at last!" cried Elizabeth, beckoning to him.

The boy got up and strolled over to the window and stood beside his sister, most unlike her: he springing from the land as rank as its corn; she being without a country, a little winged soul wandering through the universe, that merely by means of birth had alighted on Kentucky ground. At this moment beside the grave one-toned figure of her brother the many-colored nature of Elizabeth had its counterpart in the picture she offered to the eye; for the sunlight out of doors falling on the frost-jewelled window-panes spun a silvery radiance about the golden-red of the wind-woven hair, heightened the transparency of her skin, and stroked with softest pencil her little frock of forget-me-not blue. Had she been lifted to the window-frame, she would have looked like some portrait of herself done in stained glass--all atmosphered with seraphic brilliancy. As to the forget-me-not frock, everything that Elizabeth wore seemed to cherish her; her dresses bloomed about her thin, unbeautiful figure like flowers bent on hiding it, trained there by a mother's watchfulness.

"Now I am perfectly happy," she murmured, pressing her face fondly against his. "I was afraid it would be too cold for them to come."

The boy pushed her away, and placed his eye at the small clear spot on the window-pane.

"Elizabeth," he said, squinting critically, "if this is the best spy-glass you have, you would make very little headway with the enemy."

"I didn't have to make headway with the enemy!" cried Elizabeth, rejecting his hostile utterance; "I merely wished to see my friends."

The boy kept his eye at the lookout.

"Elsie has on a red woollen helmet; and she looks as though she were dyed in gore. I wish it were old William's gore!"

The sight of those far-off figures dancing toward her had awaked in Elizabeth an ecstasy, and she began to weave light-footed measures of her own.

"Now I am perfectly happy," she sang, but rather to herself as she whirled round the room.

Her brother turned toward her and propped his back against the window and folded his arms: he looked like a dwarf who had been a major-general and was conscious of it.

"I'll not be happy until that key is found. I don't propose to be defeated."

"Oh, Harold, why can't we leave everything as it has always been, if _they_ want it! If papa and mamma wish to have one more old-fashioned Christmas,--and you know it's the last,--if they wish to have one more, so do I and so do you!"

"I can't pretend, Elizabeth: they needn't ask me to pretend."

Elizabeth began to dance toward him with fairy beautiful mockery:--

"You just pretended you were dead on the battle-field, among your soldiers: you just pretended the moon was shining. You just pretended Elsie had on a red woollen helmet. You just pretended you were fighting William the Conqueror. Oh, no! It is impossible for you to pretend, you poor deficient child!"

"That's different, Elizabeth. That's not pretending; that's imagining. You knew it wasn't true: there wasn't any secret about it: it didn't fool anybody. But this pretending about Christmas and about how things get on the Tree, and that idiotic old buffoon!--that's trying to make us believe it is true when it is not true; and that it is real when it is not real! That's the way fathers and mothers raise their little immigrants!"

Elizabeth danced before him more wildly, watching him with love and beautiful laughter: "So when papa says he is Santa Claus, he is pretending! And when you say you are King Harold, you're imagining! Why, what a bright child you are! How _did_ you ever get to be a member of _this_ dull family?"

"I didn't expect you to understand the difference, because you girls are used to doing both--you girls! How could you know the difference between imagining and pretending--you girls! When you are always doing both--you girls!"

"Why, what superior creatures we must be, to do so much more than boys," sang Elizabeth. Her head was filled with fragments of nursery ditties; and the occasion seemed to warrant the production of one. With her eyes resting on him, she made a little dance in his honor and at his expense; and she cadenced her footfalls to the rhythm of her words:--

The innocent lambs!-- They have no shams, And they've nothing but wool to hide them. They cannot pretend Because at one end They've nothing but tails to guide them.

She suddenly glided forward step by step, airy sylph of unearthly joy, and threw her arms around his neck and covered his face with kisses, and then darted away from him again, dancing. With his arms folded he looked at her as a stone mile-post might have looked at a ruby-throated humming-bird.

"You promised," he said--"you promised that we'd find the key, and that all four of us would walk in on them to-night. But what do _you_ know about keeping promises--you girls!"

"I'll keep my promise, but I hope I won't find the key," said Elizabeth, as her dance grew wilder with the rising whirlwind of expectation. "But why shouldn't papa and mamma have one more Christmas as _they_ wish it! Of course we can't care as much for old times as they do; but be reasonable, Harold!"

"I can't be reasonable that way. Haven't they always told us never to pretend? Haven't they always taught us not to have secrets? Haven't they always said that a house with a secret in it wasn't a good home for children? Why can't Christmas be as open as all out of doors? Isn't that what they call being American--to be as open as all out of doors? It's the little immigrants who have secrets in them."

At that moment there was a sound of feet, muffled with yarn stockings, stamping triumphantly on the porch.

"Oh, there they are!" cried Elizabeth, darting out of the room to receive her guests. More slowly the gray-toned little figure with the white hair falling over his hawk eyes and with the profile of white flint followed her.

And three great spirits there were that walked with the lad that day--as with thousands of other lads like him: the spirit of his race, the spirit of his land, and the spirit of his house.

The real darkness of the Middle Ages was the spiritual night that settled upon children as they began to play about their homes and to ask the meanings of them--why they were built as they were--and the meaning of other things they saw in them and around them. The architects of those centuries designed their noblest buildings often with an eye to many of the worst passions of human nature. Toiling masons slowly put into mortar and stone exact arrangements for the violent and the vile: they built not for the good in human character, but against evil--not for a heaven on earth, but against a hell on earth. When the owners took possession, they had placed between themselves and the surrounding world the strongest possible proofs of a hostile and vicious attitude. Even within their homes they had fortified one intimate part against another intimate part until it was as though the ventricles of the human heart had walled themselves in distrust away from the auricles.

The mental and moral gloom of such homes hung destructively, appallingly over children. The very architecture taught them their first bad lessons. Lifted in their nurse's or mother's arms, they peered from parapet down upon drawbridge and moat--at danger. At the entrances they saw massive doors built to shut out death, perhaps battle-hacked, blood-stained. From these they learned violence and the habit of killing. Trap-doors taught them treachery. Sliding-panels in walls taught them cunning, flight, and cowardice, eaves-dropping. Underground dungeons taught them revenge, cruelty, persecution to the death: they might look down into one and see lying there some victim of slow starvation or slow torture. Nearly every leading vicious trait born in them seized upon the house itself for development, and began to clamber up its walls as naturally as castle ivy.

Little children of the Dark Ages!--does any one now ever try to enter into their terrors and troubles and warped souls? Can any one conceivably nowadays look out upon human life or up to the heavens through their vision!

When the Anglo-Saxon, heaven's blue in his eyes, sunlight in his hair, the conquest of the future in his brain, the peopling of the future in his loins, breasted fresh waters and reached the distant shore, he had come to a great land where he could build for the best that was in him. The story of the black slave fleeing across a Western river from a slave state into a free state, thrilling millions in this country, is as nothing to the story of the White Slave of the Ages who escaped across an ocean into a world where he became a free man. The cabins of this New World became the nurseries of a new kind of childhood on the earth. There is no possibility of measuring the effect upon a child and upon the man he is to be even of a door that has no lock and of windows that have no shutters. It was while sleeping behind such undefended doors and windows that the gaunt mated lions and lionesses on the Western frontiers of this Republic bred in chaste passion their lean cubs. Out of such a cabin without a bolt and with its mere latchstring there walked forth a new type of American man, the Nation's man, who as a child had trusted the open door in his father's house, and as a man trusted the door of humanity: nor had within himself secret nor secrecy, nor trick nor guile, nor double-dealing nor cruelty, nor vindictiveness nor revenge--the naked American, unpollutable iron of its strength and honor, Child of the New Childhood, Man of the New Manhood, with the great silence in him that is in the Great.

The birthplace of Harold and Elizabeth was one of the thousands and thousands of plain American homes in Kentucky and elsewhere that are the breeding-grounds and fortresses of the Republic's impregnable virtue. The house had never taught them a bad lesson; it had never offered them an architectural trait to which their own coarser human traits could attach themselves. It had never uttered a suggestion that there is anything wrong in the human nature dwelling within it or human nature approaching it from without. It was built against one enemy--the climate. And whenever the climate began war on the house, the children had a chance to see how well prepared for war it was: the climate always retreated, whipped in the end.

Their land was like their birthplace. The earliest generations of little white Kentuckians had good reason to dread their country--no children anywhere ever had more. It was their Dark Ages. Death encompassed them. Torture snatched them from the breast. Terror cradled them. But all that was good and great in their parents fought on their side; and through the Dark Ages of the West shone the lustre of a new chivalry.

But all that was changed long ago--changed except to history; and to gratitude which is the memory of the heart. On these plains of Kentucky no wildness any more, nothing unknown lurking anywhere: a deep strong land completely gentled but not weakened; over it drifting the lights and shadows of tranquil skies; and throbbing always in the heart of it a passion of tenderness that draws its wandering children back across all distances and through all years.

Ay, there were three great spirits that walked with the lad that day and with the uncounted army of his peers; the spirit of their race--the old Anglo-Saxon race that has made its best share of the world's history by cutting away with its sword the rotting curtains that conceal sham and superstition; the spirit of his country which moves with resistless strength toward the real and the strong; and the spirit of the plain American home--that fortress where the real and the ideal meet.

II

FOUR IN A CAGE

THE four children early that afternoon were shut in the library with instructions from the mother of the household: it was too cold to go out of doors any more--this was given as gentle counsel to the visitors; their father--here the head was shaken warningly at the other two--their father was finishing some very important work in his library and must not be disturbed by noises; she herself could not be with them longer because--her eyes spoke volumes of delightful mysteries, a volume that suggested preparations for the coming Night. So they must entertain themselves with whatever was within reach: there were games, there were books; especially wonderful old Christmas tales. They must not forget to read from these. Finally she summed up: they must remember in whatever they did and whatever they said that they were American children playing on Christmas Eve--the last of the Kentucky Christmas Eves in that house!

The children thought, at least Elsie thought, that they would have a better time if they were allowed to be simply children instead of American children: and she said so. She was of the opinion that being American interfered a good deal with being natural. But the rejoinder, made with graciousness and responsive humor, was that the American back was fitted to the burden and that no doubt the burden was fitted to the back: at least they could try it and see--and the door was softly closed.

The children gathered almost immediately about a centre-table on which were books and many magazines, very modern and very American magazines, which were pleasantly lighted of evenings by a reading-lamp. The two children who were at home were much used to catching echoes from those magazines as expounded and discussed by mature heads. What attracted them all now was neither lamp nor literature, but a silver tray bearing plates and knives and napkins.

"It looks as though we were going to have something delicious," said Elizabeth daintily; and she peeped under a napkin, adding with disappointment: "O dear! I am afraid it is going to be fruit!"

Even as she spoke there was a knock on the door as though something had been delayed, and the door was reopened far enough to admit the maternal hand grasping the handle of a massive old fruit basket piled with apples. There was a rush to the door, and another protest: "Only apples, and there are barrels of them in the cellar: why not potatoes and be done with it! Entertain one's company on apples!" But the door was closed firmly, and thus the situation appeared to settle down for the rest of the afternoon.

It soon having become a problem of whether the apples should go to the children or the children go to the apples, Elizabeth decided that it should be solved in the human way; and she led the group back to the table under guidance of Elsie's eyes, which more than once had turned in that direction with a delicate, not to say indelicate, suggestion.

"I suppose it is better than starving," she remarked apologetically, adjusting her glasses in order to find the next best apple for Herbert after Harold had given the best to Elsie, and as she peeled her apple, she added with some instinct of regret that she was offering her guests refreshments so meagre:--

"How much better turkey and plum pudding sound in the old Christmas stories than they are when you have them!"

Elsie did not agree with this view. "I think it is much better to _have_ them," she said.

"But in your mind's eye--" pleaded Elizabeth.

"I don't know so well about that eye!" said Elsie.

"Oh, but, Elsie," insisted Elizabeth with a rising enthusiasm, "in Dickens' _Christmas Carol_ wouldn't you rather the big prize turkey were whirled away in the cab to the Bob Cratchits?"

"I must say that I should _not_," contended Elsie.

"But the plum pudding, Elsie!" cried Elizabeth, now in the full glow of a beautiful ardor; "when Mrs. Cratchit brings in the plum pudding looking like a speckled cannon-ball, hard and firm and blazing with brandy and with Christmas holly stuck in the top of it, wouldn't you rather the little Cratchits ate _that_?"

"Indeed I would!" said Elsie; "for I never cared for that pudding; they were welcome to it."

Elizabeth dropped her head and was silent; then she murmured, in wounded loyalty to the Cratchits: "It _must_ have been good! Because Dickens said they ate all of it and wanted more. But they tried to look as though they'd had quite sufficient; and I think they were very nice about it, Elsie, for children who had had so little training. They behaved as very well bred, indeed."

"I don't doubt it," said Elsie. "I have nothing against their manners. And I suppose they thought it a good pudding! I merely remarked that _I_ did _not_ think it a good pudding! They had their opinion, and I have my opinion of that pudding."

The subject was abandoned, but a moment later revived by Herbert, sitting at Elizabeth's side:--

"Dickens had a great many more things in the _Carol_ than the turkey and the plum pudding," he observed, with his habit of taking in everything; and he began with a memorized list of the _Carol's_ Christmas luxuries in one heap--passing from geese to punch. "I always like Dickens: he gives you plenty," he concluded.

"Oh, bother!" said Harold, the Kentucky Saxon whose forefathers had been immigrants from Dickens' land. "We have everything in Kentucky that they had, and more besides. They can keep their Dickens!"

"Oh, but Harold," pleaded Elizabeth, "we haven't any American Christmas stories! Not one old fairy tale--not one!"

"We don't want any old English fairy tales. American children don't want fairy tales. Couldn't we have them if we wanted them? I should say so. Can't we make anything in our country that we want?"

"But the little Cratchits, Harold!" insisted Elizabeth, "we do want the little Cratchits!"

"We have plenty of American Cratchits just as good--and much worse."

The eating of the apples now went on silently, Elizabeth having been worsted in her battle for the Cratchits. But soon as hostess she made another effort to be charming.

"Mamma tells us that whenever we have anything very very good, we must always remember to leave a little for Lazarus. Especially at Christmas--we must remember to share with Lazarus--to leave something on our plates for him."

"Well," said Elsie, "Herbert and I have always been taught to leave something on our plates for good manners. But I never heard good manners called Lazarus. I didn't suppose Lazarus had any manners!"

Elizabeth's face and neck was colored with a quick flame, and she bent her head over her plate until her hair covered her eyes. She undertook an explanation:--

"I think I know what mamma meant, Elsie. Mamma always means a great deal. It was this way: long, long ages ago all over the world people had to divide with imaginary beings: every year they had to give so much, part of everything they owned. Then by and by--I don't know the exact date, Elsie, dear, and I don't think it makes much difference; but by and by there weren't any more imaginary beings. Mamma said that they all disappeared, going down the road of the world."

"But who got all the things?" asked Elsie. "The imaginary beings didn't get them."

"I suppose that is another story," said Elizabeth, who was determined this time not to be browbeaten. "Then just as they all disappeared down the road, from the opposite direction there came the figure of a man--Lazarus. Of course I can't tell it as mamma explains it to me, but this is what it comes to: that for ages and ages people were compelled to give up a share of what they had to imaginary beings; but now there aren't any imaginary beings, and we must divide with people we actually see."

"I don't actually see Lazarus," said Elsie.

"But with your mind's eye--!"

"Oh, _that_ eye--!"

"Mamma thought she would give us a good send-off for Christmas Eve," murmured Elizabeth with another wound: she had been as unfortunate in her crusade for Lazarus as she had been with her tirade for the Cratchits.

Elsie and Harold had pushed back their chairs and frolicked away to a distant part of the room to an unfinished game of backgammon. Elizabeth dipped her fingers into her finger-bowl, and with admiration watched Elsie in her beauty and bouncing proportions: for she was a beautiful child--with the beauty of round healthy vegetables displayed on market stalls, causing you to feel comfortable and human. As for Elizabeth, her thinness had been her pathos: from earliest childhood she had been made to realize on school playgrounds and in all juvenile companies that very thin children win no kind of leadership: with an instinct sure and no doubt wise, children uniformly give their suffrages to the fat, and vote by the pound. Now she looked longingly at the bewitching vision of her opposite--at the heavy braids of chestnut hair hanging down the broad back and tied with a bit of blue-checked ribbon--a back that would have made three of her backs. One day while being dressed by her mother she had remarked regarding herself that she was glad she was no longer: she might be taken for the sea-serpent.

Elsie was dressed in a shade of brown that suggested a blend of the colors of good morning coffee with Durham cream in it and Kentucky waffles: a kind of general breakfast brown.

Then Elizabeth's glance came home to Herbert at her side. He was dressed in much the same shade of brown. But something in his nature transmuted this, and he rather seemed clad in a raiment that suggested spun oak leaves as in autumn they lie at the bottom of still pools when the blue of the sky falls on them and chill winds pass low. Her tenderness suddenly enfolded him: it was the first time he had ever come to stay all night: it gave her an intimate sense of proprietorship in him. She settled down into her chair--the large, high-backed, parental chair--and began rather plaintively--but also not without stratagem--having first looked quickly to see that Elsie was at a safe distance:--

"Mamma says that if you have red hair and are born ugly, and grow uglier, and are very thin, and are named Elizabeth, and no one loves you, you may become a very dangerous person. She's positive that was the trouble with Queen Elizabeth. Some day it may be natural for me to want to cut off somebody's head--I don't know whose yet--but _somebody's_. Mamma and I are alike: if we were not loved, it would be the end of us."

(To think that even this innocent child should have had such guile!) A head of chestnut hair was unexpectedly moved around in front of Elizabeth's glasses and a pair of eyes peeped in through those private windows: peeped--disappeared. From the other chair a voice sounded, becoming confidential:--

"Some time before you are grown, Elizabeth, some one is going to tell you something."

"I wish I knew what it was _now_!" murmured Elizabeth.

"You will know when the time comes."

"I don't see why the time doesn't come now."

"Before you are grown?"

"It's the same thing--I _feel_ grown--for the moment!"

Elizabeth looked around again to see where Elsie was.

"I'd like to ask you a question, Elizabeth."

"I should be pleased to answer the question."

"But father told me not to ask any questions: I was to wait till I got back home and ask _him_."

"I think that is very strange! Aren't there questions a boy can't ask his father? A father wouldn't be the right one to answer. You must ask the one who can answer!"

There was no reply.

"Well," urged Elizabeth, feeling the time was short (there have been others!), "if you can't _ask_ it, _pop_ it! If you can't ask the question, pop the question."

And then--clandestinely down behind the backs of the chairs! And not on the cheek! Exact style of the respondent not accurately known--probably early Elizabethan.

* * * * *

Toward the middle of the afternoon as they played further about the room in search of whatever entertainment it afforded, they stopped before an old cabinet with shelves arranged behind glass doors.

On one of the upper shelves stood some little oval frames of blue or of rose-colored velvet; and in the frames were miniatures of women of old Southern days with bare ivory necks and shoulders and perhaps a big damask rose on the breast or pendent in a cataract of curls behind the ear: women who made you think what must have been the physical and mental calibre of the men who had captured them and held them captured: Elizabeth's grandmothers and aunts on the mother's side. The two girls, each with an arm around the other's waist and heads close together, peered through the glass doors at the vital dames.

"Don't they look as though they liked to dance and to eat and to manage everything and everybody?" said Elsie, always practical.

"Don't they look _proud_!" said Elizabeth proudly, "and _true_! and don't they look _alive_!"

But she linked her arm in Elsie's and drew her away to something else, adding in delicate confidence: "I think I am glad, though, Elsie, that mamma does not look like _them_. There is no one in the world like mamma! I am a little like her, but I dwindled. Children _do_ dwindle nowadays, don't they?"

"Not I," said Elsie. "I didn't dwindle. Do you notice any dwindling anywhere about me? Please say where."

On the middle and lower shelves of the cabinet were some long-ago specimens of mounted wild duck; and on the moss-ragged boughs of an artificial oak some age-moulted passenger pigeons. The boys talked about these, and told stories of their grandfathers' hunting days when pigeons in multitudes flecked the morning sky on frosty mornings or had made blue feathery clouds about the oak trees in the vast Kentucky pastures.

Following this lead, the boys went to the book-shelves, and taking down a volume of Audubon's great folio work on _American Birds_, they spread it open on the carpet and, sprawling before it, found the picture of the vanished wild pigeon there, and began to read about him.

Observing this, Elizabeth and Elsie took down a volume of the same great man's work on _American Animals_; and with it open before them on the floor a few yards away, facing the boys, they began to turn the pages, looking indifferently for whatever beasts might appear.

Elizabeth's peculiar interest in animal pictures had begun during the summer previous, when the family were having a vacation trip in Europe. Upon her visits to galleries of paintings she had repeatedly encountered the same picture: The Manger with the Divine Child as the centre of the group; and about the Child, half in shadow, the donkey and others of his lowly fellows of the stall--all turned in brute adoration. The memory of these Christmas pictures came vividly back to her now--especially the face of the donkey who was always made to look as though he had long been expecting the event; and whereas reasonably gratified, could not definitely say that he was much surprised: his entire aspect being that of a creature too meek and lowly to think that anything foreseen by him could possibly be much of a miracle.

Once also she had seen another animal picture that fascinated her: it represented a blond-haired little girl of about her own age, with bare feet, hair hanging down, a palm branch in her hand. She was escorted by a troop of wild animals, each vying with the other in attempt to convince this exceptional little girl that nothing could induce them just at present to be carnivorous.

The most dangerous beasts walked at the head of the line; the less powerful took their places in the rear; and the procession gradually tapered off in the distance until only the smallest creatures were to be seen struggling resolutely along in the parade. The meaning of the picture seemed to be that nothing harmful could come from the animal kingdom on this particular day, providing the animals were allowed to arrange themselves as specified in the procession. What might have happened on the day preceding or the day following was not guaranteed; nor what might have befallen the little girl on this day if she had not been a blonde; nor what might overtake little boys, dark or fair, at any time. This picture also was in Elizabeth's memory as she turned Audubon's mighty pages; but somehow no American animals seemed to be represented in it: probably absenting themselves through the American desire--ranging through the whole animal kingdom--not to appear sentimental. All, no doubt, would have been glad to parade behind Elizabeth; but they must have agreed that only the sheep in the United States has the right to look sheepish.

The boys, sitting behind the _Birds_, and the girls sitting behind the _Quadrupeds_, turned the leaves and began to toss their comments and their fun back and forth.

"The wild pigeon is gone," said Harold, whose ideas on this subject and others related to it showed that he had listened with a good purpose to a father who was a naturalist and patriotic American. "The wild pigeon is gone, and the buffalo is gone, and the deer is going, and all the other big game is gone or is going, and the birds are going, and the forests are going, and the streams are going, and the Americans are going: everything is going but the immigrants--they are coming."

"Oh, but, Harold, we were immigrants once," admitted Elizabeth.

"We were Anglo-Saxon immigrants," said the son of his father; "and they're the only kind for this country. If all the rest of the country were like Kentucky, it wouldn't be so bad. And we American boys have got to get busy when we are men, or there won't be any real Americans left: I expect to stand for a big family, I do," he affirmed to Herbert as though he somehow appropriated the privilege and the glory of it.

"So do I intend to stand for a big family," replied Herbert quickly and jealously, now that matters seemed to be on a satisfactory basis with Elizabeth.

"We boys are going to do our part," called out the Anglo-Saxon to the girls sitting opposite. "You American girls will have to do yours!"

"We shall be quite ready," Elizabeth sang back dreamily.

"We shall be ready," echoed Elsie, not to be excluded from her full share in future proceedings, "and we shall be much pleased to be ready!"

The boys turning the pages of the _Birds_ had reached the picture of the American robin redbreast; and the girls turning the pages of the _Quadrupeds_ had reached the picture of the American rabbit; Elizabeth was softly stroking its ears and coat.

"I think," said Herbert, looking across at Elizabeth, and also of that cordial lusty household bird whose picture was before him, "I think that if a real American were to begin at twenty and keep on until he was, say, ninety, he'd be able to down the immigrants with a family."

"Why ninety?" inquired Elizabeth, looking tenderly back at him and apparently disturbed by the fixing of an arbitrary limit.

"That's all the Bible allows; then you take a rest."

"Oh, then our family didn't want any rest," exclaimed Harold; "for grandfather had a child when he was ninety-one: isn't that so, Elizabeth?"

"Oh, Harold! You've got that wrong. It wasn't grandmother, you dear lamb! Wasn't it a woman in the Old Testament--Sarah--or Hagar--or maybe Rebecca?"

"Anyhow, I'm right about grandfather! I'm positive he had one. Hurrah for grandfather! He was the right kind of American! When I'm a man, I'll be the right kind: I'll have the largest family in this neighborhood."

"Don't say that! Take that back!"

"I _will_ say it, and I do say it!"

"Then--take--_that_!"

The member of the military institute received a slap in the mouth from a masculine overgrown hand which caused him to measure the length of his spine backward on a large damask rose in the velvet carpet.

They fought as two young males should, one of whom had recently imagined himself the last of the Saxon kings and the other of whom had realized himself as an accepted lover. They fought for a moment over the priceless folio of Audubon and ruined those open pages where the robin, family-bird of the yards, had innocently brought on the fray. They fought round the room, past furniture and over it: Elsie following with delight and wishing that each would be well punished; Elizabeth following in despair, broken-hearted lest either should be worsted.

"The idea of two brats fighting over which is going to have the largest family!" cried the former.

"Oh, Harold, Harold, Harold!" implored Elizabeth. "To fight in your own house!"

"Where could I fight if I didn't fight in my own house?" shouted the Saxon. "I couldn't fight in his."

"Yes; you can fight in mine--whenever you've a mind!" shouted his hospitable foe.

Then something intervened--miraculously. The boys had reached the farther end of the library and the locked doors. There they had clinched again, and there they went down sidewise with a heavy fall against those barriers. As they started to their feet to close in again, the miracle took place--a real miracle, and most appropriate to Christmas Eve. In the Middle Ages such a miracle would have given rise to a legend, a saint, a shrine, and relics.

Elizabeth, who had hung upon the edge of battle, was the first to see it. As her brother rose, she threw herself upon him and whispered:

"Oh, look, Harold! Now you'll stop!"

Through the large empty keyhole of the locked doors an object was making its way: first one long green finger appeared, and then a second, and then a third--those three sacred fingers--as old as Buddha! They made their way into the air of the library, followed by a foot or more of timber; and the fingers and arm taken together constituted a broken-off bough of the Christmas Tree: sign of peace and good will on earth on that Eve: a true modern miracle!

But the member of the military institute did not see it in that light; what it suggested to him was the memory of certain green twigs that in earlier years had played stingingly around a pair of bare disobedient legs--wanton disturbers of common household peace; and as he stood there remembering, his recollection was further assisted by certain minatory movements of the sacred bough itself in the keyhole--a reminder that the same hand was now at the end of the switch. It was not the miraculous that persuaded him: it was the much too natural! But then is not the natural in such a case miraculous enough? To take a small green cylinder of vegetable tissue and apply it to a larger unclad cylinder of animal tissue, with a spasmodic contraction of muscular tissue, and get a moral result from the gray matter of the distant brain: is not that miraculous enough? If people must hunt for miracles and must have them, can they not find all they want in the natural?

There was stillness in the library as that green bough slowly disappeared. The rabbit and the robin, the latter badly torn, got put back upon the shelves in their respective volumes. And presently there was nothing more to be seen but four laughing children.

* * * * *

And now it was getting late. Outside and all over the land snow was falling--the longed-for snow of Christmas Eve. And the last thing to chronicle regarding the afternoon was a reading.

The little gray-toned lad with the mop of whitish hair and the profile of white flint had straggled back to the story which had absorbed him earlier that day--The Book of the World's Great Battles; and he had read to his listeners seated around him the story of the sad battle of Hastings when Saxon Harold fell, and green Saxon England with its mighty throne was lost to fair-haired Saxon men and women--for a long, sad time.

This boy was living very close to the mind of a father who was watching the history of his country; and his own brain was full of small echoes, which perhaps did not echo very fully and truly.

"That is the kind of battle we are going to fight," he said. "England had to fight her immigrants, and we some day shall have to fight our immigrants! Because they _will_ bring into our country old things from their old countries, and we won't have those old things. They are the ones that brought in this silly old Santa Claus."

"If there is a war," said the son of the doctor, "I'll be the surgeon; and I know of two salves already--one for wounds that are open and one for wounds that might as well be. It's a salve that father got in France; and they may have used it at the battle of Waterloo; that's why there were so many soldiers limping around afterwards."

"Well, Herbert," said Elsie, "it couldn't have been such a wonderful salve if it set everybody to limping."

"Well, it is either limp or be dead: so they limped."

"What I like about the French," said Harold, remembering a summer spent in France, "is the big red breeches on the soldiers: then you've got the gore on you all the time, whether you're fighting or not."

Elizabeth's mild beam of humor saw a chance to shine:--

"Oh, but, Harold," she exclaimed, "they _are_ so dangerous! You know the towns were full of soldiers, and there wasn't one in the country. If a soldier is seen in the pastures, the French bulls get after them! Blue is better: then you aren't chased!"

It had come Elizabeth's time to read. She made preparations for it with the finest sense of how beautiful an occasion it was going to be: she hunted for the best chairs; she pushed them together near one of the windows where the last afternoon light from the snow-darkened sky began to fall mystically; then she went to the children's corner of Fairy Tales and softly peered along the shelf; and she drew out a well-remembered volume. Then, seating herself before her auditors, she began in the sweetest, most faltering of voices to read a story that in earlier years had charmed them all.

She had scarcely begun before she discovered that she no longer had an audience: nobody listened. Saddest of all, Elizabeth found that she did not herself listen: she could no longer draw close even to the boundaries of that once magical world: it was gone from her and now she herself loved it only as she saw it in the dim distance--on the Elysian Fields of lost things.

There may have been something of import to the future of this nation in the way in which these four country children, crowded as it were on a narrow headland looking toward the Past, there said good-by for the last time to faith in the whole literature of Fairy Land. The splendid, the terrible race of creatures which once had peopled the world of imagination for races and civilizations had now crumbled to dust at the touch of those little minds. For in the hard white light of our New World backward, always backward toward the cradle moves the retreating line of faith in the old superstitions: the shadows of the supernatural retire more and more toward the very curtains that cradle infancy; and it may be that the last miracle of fable will die where it was born--on the lips of the child.

Elizabeth's face flamed red as she shut the book. It was dead to her; but her brain was musical with refrains about things that had gone to those inner Fields of hers; and now as though she felt herself just a little alone--even from Herbert--she walked away to the piano:--

"You wouldn't listen to the story, but you'll have to listen to a song! This is _my_ song to a Fairy--my slumber song! It is away off in the woods, and I go all by myself to where she is, and I sing this song to her." So Elizabeth sang:--

"Over thee bright dews be shaken; On thine eyelids violets blow; At thy hand white stars awaken; Past thee sun and darkness go!

"In the world where thou art vanished, All dear things are ever young. I as thou will soon be vanished, I like thee from nought am sprung.

"Slumber, slumber! Why awaken? No one now believes in thee. I shall sleep while worlds are shaken-- No one will believe in me."

It was the poorest, most faltering, yet most faithful voice--the mere note of a linnet long before the singing season has begun. As it died out, she descended from her premature perch and went with her repudiated book to the shelves where it must be put--not to be taken down again. In the shadow of the library and with the uncertainty of her glasses, she fumbled as she sought the place, and the volumes on each side collapsed together. Whereupon a large key slid from the top and fell to the floor. With a low cry of delight--but of regret also--she seized it and held it up:--

"Oh, Harold, the key! I have found it!"

As the others hurried to her, she said to Elsie, as though boys were not fine enough to understand anything so fine:--

"It was like mamma to hide the key _there_! She gave it to the old Christmas stories to keep and guard!"

* * * * *

Soon after this the children were not seen in the room. Some one came for them, and they were made ready for supper. After supper they were kept well guarded in another part of the house; and at an earlier hour than usual the little flock were herded up-stairs and at the top divided along masculine and feminine by-paths toward drowsy folds.

No lights were brought into the room where they had been playing. The red embers of the anthracite sank lower under their ashes: all was darkness and silence for the mysteries of Christmas Eve.

III

THE REALM OF MIDNIGHT

A QUARTER of a century ago or more the German Christmas Tree--the diffusion of which throughout the world was begun soon after the close of the Napoleonic wars--had not made its way into general use throughout the rural districts of central Kentucky. The older Dutch and English festivals which had blent their features into the American holiday was the current form celebrated in blue-grass homes. The German forest-idea had been adopted in the towns for churches and other public festivities; and in private houses also that were in the van of the world-movement. But out in the country the evergreen had not yet enriched the great winter drama of Nature with its fresh note of the immortal drawn from a dead world: the evergreen was to eyes there the evergreen still, as the primrose to other eyes had been the primrose and nothing more.

Thus there was no Christmas Tree; and Christmas Eve brought no joy to children except that of waiting for Christmas morning. Not until they went to sleep or feigned slumber; not until fires died down in chimney-corners where socks and stockings hung from a mantelpiece or from the backs of maternal and paternal chairs--not till then did the Sleigh of the White World draw near across the landscape of darkness. Out of its realm of silence and snow it was suddenly there!--outside the house, laden with gifts, drawn by tireless reindeer and driven by its indefatigable forest-god. He was no longer young, the driver, as was shown in his case, quite as it is shown in the case of commoner men, by his white beard and round ruddy middle-aged face; but his twinkling eyes and fresh good humor showed that the core of him was still boyish; and apparently the one great lesson he had learned from half a lifetime was that the best service he could render the whole world consisted in giving it one night of innocent happiness and kindness. Not until well on toward midnight was he there at the house, without sound or signal, the Sleigh perhaps halted at the front gate or drawn up behind aged cedar trees in the yard; or for all that any one knew to the contrary, resting lightly on the roof of the house itself, or remaining poised up in the air.

At least on the roof _he_ was: he peeked down the chimney to see whether the fire were out (and he never by any mistake went to the wrong chimney): then he scrambled hurriedly down. If any children were in bed in the room, he tickled the soles of their feet to prove if they were asleep; then crammed socks and stockings; dispersed other gifts around on the tops of furniture; left his smile on everything to last a year--the smile of old forgiveness and of new affection--and was up the chimney again--back in the Sleigh--gone! Gone to the next house, then to the next, and on from house to house over the neighborhood, over the nation, over the world: the first to operate without accidental breakdown the heavier-than-air machine, unless it were possibly a remote American kinswoman of his, the New England witch on her broomstick aeroplane: which however she was never able to travel on outside New England. In this belting of the globe with a sleigh in a single night he must often have come to rivers and mountain ranges where passage was impossible; and then it is certain that the Sleigh was driven up to the roadway of the clouds and travelled across the lonely stretches of the snow before it fell.

Why he should come near midnight--who ever asked such a question? Has not that hour always been the natural locality and resort for the supernatural? What things merry or sorry could ever have come to pass but for the stroke of midnight? How could Shakespeare have written certain dramas without the mere aid of twelve o'clock? What considerable part of English literature would drop out of existence but for the fact that Big Ben struck twelve!

The children stood at the head of the stairs; and the Great Night which was to climb so high began for them low down--with the furniture. Standing there, they listened for the sound of any movement in the house: there was none, and they began to descend. Stairways in homesteads built as solid as that did not give way with any creaking of timbers under the pressure of feet; and they were thickly carpeted. Half way down the children leaned over the banisters and listened again.

Here at the turning of the stairway, directly below, there lived in his pointed weather-house the old Time-Sentinel of the family, who with his one remaining arm saluted evermore backward and forward in front of his stiff form; and at every swing of this limb you could hear his muscle crack in his ancient shoulder-joint. A metallic salute which the children had been accustomed to all their lives was one of the only two sounds that now reached them.

The other sound came from near him: sitting on the hall carpet on a square rug of tin especially provided for her was the winter companion of the time-piece--a large round mica-plated anthracite stove--middle-aged, designing, and corpulent. This seeming stove, whose puffed flushed cheeks now reflected an unusual excitement, gave out little comfortable wooing sounds, all confidential and travelling in a soft volley toward the sentinel, backed gaunt and taciturn against the wall.

The children of the house had long ago named this pair the Cornered Soldier and the Marrying Stove; and they explained the positions of the two as indicating that the stove had backed the veteran into the corner and had sat largely down before him with the determination to remain there until she had warmed him up to the proper response. The veteran however devoted his existence to moving his arm back and forth to ward off her infatuation, and meanwhile he persisted in muttering in his loudest possible monotone: _Go away--keep off! Go away--keep off! Go away--keep off!_ There were seasons of course when the stove became less ardent, for even with the fibre of iron such pursuits must relax sometimes; but the veteran never permitted his arm to stop waving, trusting her least when she was cold--rightly enough!

At the foot of the stairway they encountered a pair of objects that were genuinely alive. Two aged setters with gentle eyes and gentle ears and gentle dispositions rose from where they lay near the stove, came around, and, putting their feet on the lowest step, stretched themselves backward with a low bow, and then, leaning forward with softly wagging tails, they pushed their noses against the two children of the house, inquiring why they were out of bed at that unheard-of hour: they offered their services. But being shoved aside, they returned to their places and threw themselves down again--not curled inward with chilliness, but flat on the side with noses pointed outward: they were not wholly reassured, and the ear of one was thrown half back, leaving the auditory channel uncurtained: they had no fear, but they felt solicitude.

The children made their way on tiptoe along the hall toward the door of the library. Having paused there and listened, they entered and groped their way to the far end where the doors connected this room with the parlor. As they strained their ears against these barriers, low sounds reached them from the other side: smothered laughter; the noise of things being taken out of papers; the sound of feet moving on a step-ladder; the sagging of a laden bough as it touched other laden boughs. Through the keyhole there streamed into the darkness of the library a little shaft of light.

"They are in there! There is a light in the room! They're hanging the presents on! We've caught them!"

The leader of the group was about to insert the key when suddenly upon the intense stillness there broke a sound; and following upon that sound what a chorus of noises!

For at that moment the old house-sentinel struck twelve--the Christmas-Night Twelve. The children had never heard such startling strokes--for the natural reason that never before had they been awake and alone at that hour. As those twelve loud clear chimes rang out, the two other guardians of the house drowsing by the clock, apprehensive after all regarding the children straying about in the darkness--these expressed their uneasiness by a few low gruff barks, and one followed with a long questioning howl--a real Christmas ululation! Then out in the henhouse a superannuated rooster drew his long-barrelled single-shooter out of its feather and leather case, cocked it and fired a volley point-blank at the rafters: the sound seemed made up of drowsiness, a sore throat, general gallantry, and a notice that he kept an eye on the sun even when he had no idea where it was--the early Christmas clarion! Further away in the barn a motherly cow, kept awake by the swayings and totterings of an infant calf apparently intoxicated on new milk, stood up on her hind feet and then on her fore feet and mooed--quite a Christmas moo! In a near-by stall an aged horse who now seemed to recognize what was expected of him on the occasion struggled to his fore feet and then to his hind feet, and squaring himself nickered--his best Christmas nicker! Under some straw in a shed a litter of pigs, disposed with heads and tails as is the packing of sardines--except that for the sardines the oil is poured on the general outside, but for the pigs it still remained on the individual inside--these pigs slept on--the proper Christmas indifference! For there had never been any holy art for them: nor miracles of their manger: they had merely been good enough to be eaten, never good enough to be painted! They slept on while they could!--mindful of the peril of ancestral boar's head and of the modern peril of brains for breakfast and sausage for supper. Then on the hearthstone of the library itself not far from where the children were huddled the American mouse which is always found there on Christmas Eve--this mouse, coming out and seeing the children, shrieked and scampered--a fine Christmas shriek! Whereat on the opposite side of the hearth a cricket stopped chirping and dodged over the edge of the brick--a clever Christmas dodge!

All these leaving what a stillness!

As noiselessly as possible the key was now inserted, the lock turned, and the door thrown quickly open; and there on the threshold of the forbidden room, the children gasped--baffled--gazing into total darkness! The coals of mystery forever glow even under the ashes in the human soul; and these coals now sent up in faint wavering flashes of a burnt-out faith: they were like the strange delicate wavering Northern lights above a frozen horizon: after all--in the darkness--amid the hush of the house--at the hour of midnight--with the perfume of wonderful things wafted thickly to their sense--after all, was there not some truth in the Legend?

Then out of that perfumed darkness a voice sounded: "Come in if you wish to come in!"

And the voice was wonderful, big, deep, merry, kind--as though it had but one meaning, the love of the earth's children; it betokened almighty justice and impartiality to children. And it betrayed no surprise or resentment at being intruded upon. After a while it invited more persuasively: "Come in if you wish to come in."

And this time it seemed not so much to proceed from near the Tree as to emanate from the Tree itself--to be the Tree speaking!

The children of the house at once understood that the nature of their irruption had shifted. Their father in that disguised voice was issuing instructions that they were not to dare question the ancient Christmas rites of the house, nor attack his sacred office in them. For this hour he was still to be the Santa Claus of childish faith. Since they did not believe, they must make-believe! The scene had instantly been turned into a house miracle-drama: and they were as in a theatre: and they were to witness a play! And the voice did not hesitate an instant in its exaction of obedience, but at once entered upon the rôle of a supernatural personage:--

"Was I mistaken? Were not children heard whispering on the other side of a door, and was not the door unlocked and thrown open? They must be there! If they are gone, I am sorry. If they are still there--you children! I'm glad to see you. Though of course I don't _see_ you!"

"We're glad to see you--though we don't see _you_!"

"You came just in time. I was about going. What delayed me--but strange things have happened to-night! As I drove up to this house, suddenly the life seemed to go out of me. It was never so before. And as I stepped out of the Sleigh, I felt weary and old. And the moment I left the reins on the dashboard, my reindeer, which were trembling with fright of a new kind, fled with the Sleigh. And now I am left without knowing when and how I shall get away. But on a night like this wonderful things happen; and I may get some signal from them. A frightened horse will run away from its dismounted master and then come back to him. And they may come for me. I may get a signal. I shall wait. But as I said, I feel strangely lifeless: and I think I shall sit down. Will you sit down, please? Where you are, since you cannot _see_ any chairs," he said with the sweetest gayety.

In the darkness there were the sounds of laughing delighted children--grouping themselves on the floor.

"Now," said the voice, "I think I'll come around to your side of the Tree so that there'll be nothing between us!"

He was coming--coming as the white-haired Winter-god, Forest-spirit, of the earth's children! They heard him advance around from behind the Tree, moving to the right; and one of them who possessed the most sensitive hearing felt sure that another personage advanced more softly around from behind the Tree, on the left side. However this may be, all heard _him_ sit down, heard the boughs rustle about him as he worked his thick jolly figure back under them until they must have hung about his neck and down over his eyes: then he laughed out as though he had taken his seat on his true Forest Throne.

"When I am at home in my own country," he said, "I am accustomed to sleep with my back against an evergreen. I believe in your lands you prefer pine furniture: I like the whole tree."

A tender voice put forth an unexpected question:--

"Are you sure that there is not some one with you?"

"Is not that a strange question?"

"Ah yes, but in the old story when St. Nicholas arrived, an angel came with him: are you right sure there's not an angel in the room with you now?"

"I certainly _see_ no angel, though I think I hear the voice of one! Do you see any angel?"

"With my mind's eye."

"That must be the very best eye with which to see an angel!"

"But if there were a light in the room--!"

"Pardon me! If there were a light, I might not be here myself. If you changed the world at all, you would change it altogether."

A bolder voice broke in:--

"You're a very mysterious person, are you not?"

"Not more mysterious than you, I should say. Is there anything more mysterious than one of you children?"

"Oh, but that's a different kind of mysterious: we don't pretend to be mysterious: you do!"

"Oh, do I! You seem to know more about me than I know about myself. When you have lived longer, you may not feel so certain about understanding other people. But then I'm not people," he added joyously, and they heard him push his way further back under the boughs of the Tree--withdrawing more deeply into its mystery.

"Now then, while I wait, what shall we do?"

IV

TIME-SPIRIT AND ETERNAL SPIRIT

A HURRIED whispering began among the children, and the result was quickly announced:--

"We should like to ask you some questions." Evidently the intention was that questions should riddle him--make reasonable daylight shine through his mysterious pretensions: on the stage of his own theatre he was to be stripped.

"I treat all children alike," he replied with immediate insistence on his divine rights. "And if any could ask, all should ask. But suppose every living child asked me a question. That would be at least a million to every hair on my head: don't you think that would make any head a little heavy? Besides, I've always gotten along so well all over the world because I have done what I had to do and have never stopped to talk. As soon as you begin to talk, don't you get into trouble--with somebody? Who has ever forced a word out of me!"

How alert he was, nimble, brisk, alive! A marvellous kind of mental arctic light from him began to spread through the pitchiness of the room as from a sun hidden below the horizon.

"But everything seems going to pieces tonight," he continued; "and maybe I might let my silence go to pieces also. Your request is granted--but--remember, one question apiece--the first each thinks of--and not quarrelsome: this is no night for quarrelsome questions!"

The lot of asking the first fell naturally to Elsie, and her question had her history back of it; the question of each had life-history.

When Elsie first came to know about the mysterious Gift-bringer from the North, she promptly noticed in her sharp way that he was already old; nor thereafter did he grow older. She found pictures of him taken generations before she was born--and there he was just as old! She judged him to be about fifty-five years or sixty as compared with middle-aged Kentucky farmers, some of whom were heavy-set men like him with florid complexions, and with snow on their beards and hair, and mischievous eyes and the same high spirits. Only, there was one who had no spirits at all except the very lowest. This was a deacon of the country church, who instead of giving presents to the children once a year pushed a long-handled box at them every Sunday and tried to force them to make presents to him! One hot morning of early summer--he had so annoyed her--when the box again paused tantalizingly in front of her, she had shot out a plump little hand and dropped into it a frantic indignant June bug which presently raised a hymn for the whole congregation. She hated the deacon furthermore because he resembled Santa Claus, and she disliked Santa Claus because he resembled the deacon: she held them responsible for resembling each other. All this was long ago in her short life, but the ancient grudge was still lodged in her mind, and it now came out in her question:--

"Why did you wait to get old before you began to bring presents to children; why didn't you bestir yourself earlier; and what were you doing all the years when you were young?"

If you could have believed that trees laughed, you would have said that the Christmas Fir was laughing now.

"That is a very good question, but it is not very simple, I am sorry to say; and by my word I am bound not to answer it; you were told that the question must be simple! However, I am willing to make you a promise: I do not know where I may be next year, but wherever you are, you will receive, I hope, a little book called _Santa Claus in the Days of his Youth_. I hope you will find your question answered there to your satisfaction. And now--for the next."

During the years of Elizabeth's belief in the great Legend of the North, second to her delight in the coming of the gifts was sorrow at the going of them. Every year an avalanche of beautiful things flowed downward over the world, across mountain ranges, across valleys and rivers; and each house chimney received its share from the one vast avalanche. Every year! And for all she knew these avalanches had been in motion thousands of years. But where were the gifts? Gone, melted away; so that there were now no more at the end of time than there had been at the beginning. The fate of the vanished lay tenderly over the landscape of the world for her.

"You say that one night of every winter you drive round the earth in your sleigh, carrying presents. Every summer don't you disguise yourself and drive over the same track in an old cart and gather them up again? Many a summer day I have watched you without your knowing it!"

This time you could have believed that if evergreens are sensitive, the fir now stood with its boughs lowered a little pensively and very still.

"I am sorry! The question violates the same mischief-making rule, and by my word I am bound not to answer it. But it is as easy to give a promise to two as to one; next year I hope you will receive a little book called _Santa Claus with the Wounded and the Lost_. And I wish you joy in that story. Now then!"

"Father told me not to ask any questions while I was over here: to wait and ask _him_."

The little theatre of make-believe almost crumbled to its foundations beneath that one touch of reality! The great personage of the drama lost control of his resources for a moment. Then the little miracle-play was successfully resumed:--

"Well, then, I won't have to answer any questions for you!"

"But I can tell you what I was _going_ to ask! I was going to ask you if you are married. And if you are, why you travel always without your wife. I was wondering whether you didn't like _your_ wife!"

The answer came like a blinding flash--like a flash meant to extinguish another flash:--

"A book, a book! Another book! There will have to be another book! Look out for one next Christmas, dropped down the chimney especially for you: and I hope it won't fall into the fire or into the soot--_Santa Claus and_ his _Wife_. Now then--time flies!"

During the infantile years when the heir of the house had been a believer in the figure beside the Tree, there had always been one point he jealously weighed: whether children of white complexion were not entitled to a larger share of Christmas bounty than those of red or yellow or brown or black faces; and in particular whether among all white children those native to the United States ought not to receive highest consideration. The old question now rang out:

"What do _you_ think of the immigrants?"

The Tree did not exactly laugh aloud, but it certainly laughed all over--with hearty wholesome approving laughter.

"That question is the worst offender of all; it is quarrelsome! It is the most quarrelsome question that could be asked. What are immigrants to me? But next year look out for a book called _Santa Claus on Immigrants_."

"Put plenty of gore in it!"

"Gore! Gore on Christmas Eve! But if there was gore, since it is in a book, it would have to be dry gore. But wouldn't salve be better--salve for old wounds?"

"If you're going to put salve in, you might use my Waterloo salve!"

"Don't be peculiar, Herbert--especially away from home!"

Certainly the Tree was shaken with laughter this time.

"See what things grow to when once started; here were four questions, and now they fill four books. But time flies. Now I must make haste! My reindeer!--"

His ingenuity was evidently at work upon this pretext as perhaps furnishing him later on a way through which he might effect his escape: in this little theatre of thin illusion there must be some rear exit; and through this he hoped to retire from the stage without losing his dignity and the illusion of his rôle.

"My reindeer," he insisted, holding fast to that clew for whatsoever it might lead him to, "if they should rush by for me, I must be ready. A faint distant signal--and I'm gone! So before I go, in return for your questions I am going to ask you one. But first there is a little story--my last story; and I beg you to listen to it."

* * * * *

After a pause he began:--

"Listen, you children! You children of this house, you children of the world!

"You love the snow. You play in it, you hunt in it; it brings the melody of sleigh-bells, it gives white wings to the trees and new robes to the earth. Whenever it falls on the roof of this house and in the yard and upon the farm, sooner or later it vanishes; it is forever rising and falling, forming and melting--on and on through the ages.

"If you should start from your home to-night and travel northward, after a while you would find everything steadily changing: the atmosphere growing colder, living creatures beginning to be left behind, those that remain beginning to look white, the voices of the earth beginning to die out: color fading, song failing. As you journeyed on always you would be travelling toward the silent, the white, the dead. And at last you would come to a land of no sun and of all silence except the noise of wind and ice; you would have entered the kingdom of eternal snow.

"If from your home you should start southward, as you crossed land after land in the same way, you would begin to see that life was failing and the harmonies of the planet replaced by the discord of lifeless forces--storming, crushing, grinding. And at last you would reach the threshold of another world that you dared not enter and that nothing alive ever faces: the home of perpetual frost.

"If you should rise straight into the air from your housetop as though you were climbing the side of a mountain, you would find at last that you had ascended to a height where the mountain would be capped forever with snow. For all round the earth wherever its mountains are high enough, their summits are capped with the one same snow: above us all everywhere lies the upper land of eternal cold.

"Sometime in the future--we do not know when--the spirit of cold at the north will move southward; the spirit of cold at the south will move northward; the spirit of cold in the upper air will move downward; and the three will meet, and for the earth there will be one whiteness and silence--rest.

"Little children, the earth is burning out like a bedroom candle. The great sun is but a longer candle that burns out also. All the stars are but candles that one by one go out in the darkness of the universe. Now tell me, you children of this house, you children of the earth, for I make no difference among you and ask each the same question: when the earth and the sun and the stars are burnt out like your bedroom candles, where in that darkness will you be? Where will all the children of the earth be then?"

And now at last the Great Solemn Night drew apart its curtains of mystery and revealed its spiritual summit.

Out of these ordinary American children had all but died the last vestiges of the superstitions of their time and of earlier ages. They were new children of a new land in a new time; and they were the voices of fresh millions--voices that rose and floated far and wide as a revelation of the spirit of man stripped of worn-out rags and standing forth in its divine nakedness--wingèd and immortal.

"I know where I shall be," said the lad whose ideal of this life turned toward strength that would not fail and truth that could not waver.

"I know where I shall be," said the little soul whose earthly ideal was selfishness: who had within herself humanity's ideal that hereafter somewhere in the universe all desires will be gratified.

"I know where I shall be," said the little soul whose earthly ideal was the quieting of the world's pain: who had vague notions of a land where none would be sick and none suffer.

"I know where I shall be," said the little soul whose ideal of life was the gathering and keeping of all beautiful things that none should be lost and that none should change.

Then in the same spirit in which the group of them had carried on their drama of the night they now asked him:--

"Where will _you_ be?"

For a while there was no answer, and when at length the answer came it was low indeed:--

"Wherever the earth's children are, may I be there with them!"

As the vast modern cathedral organ can be traced back through centuries to the throat of a dry reed shaken with its fellows by the wind on the banks of some ancient river, so out of the throats of these children began once more the chant of ages-that deep majestical organ-roll of humanity.

The darkened parlor of the Kentucky farmhouse became the plain where shepherds watched their flocks--it became the Mount of Transfiguration--it became Calvary--it became the Apocalypse. It became the chorus out of all lands, out of all ages:--

"_And there were shepherds--The Lord is my shepherd--Unto us a child is born--I know that my Redeemer liveth--I know in whom I have believed--In my Father's house are many mansions--I go to prepare a place for you--Where I am you may be also--The earth shall pass away, but my word will not pass away--Now is Christ risen from the dead--Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God Who is our home--Thou wilt not leave us in the dust--Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me--My Pilot face to face when I have crost the bar--_"

In the room was the spiritual hymn of the whole earth from the beginning until now: that somewhere in the universe there is a Father and a Fatherland; that on a dying planet under a dying sun amid myriads of dying stars there is something that does not die--the Youth of Man. In that youth all that had been best in him will come to fullest life; all that was worst will have dropped away.

The room was very still awhile.

Then upon its intense stillness there broke a sound--faint, far away through the snow-thickened air--a melody of coming sleigh-bells. All heard, all listened.

"Hark, hark! Do you hear! Listen! They are coming for me! They're coming!"

The Tree shook as he who was sitting under its branches rose to his feet with these words.

"That is father's sleigh: I know those bells: those are our sleigh-bells. That is father!" said a grave boy excitedly.

"Ah! Is that what _you_ think _I_ hear! Then indeed it is time for me to be going!"

There was a rustling of the boughs of the Christmas Tree as though the guest were leaving.

Nearer, nearer, nearer, along the turnpike came the sound of the bells. At the front gate the sound suddenly ceased.

"They're waiting for me!" said a voice from behind the Tree as it moved away in the direction of the chimney.

Then all heard something more startling still.

The sleigh was approaching the house. Out of the silence and the darkness of Christmas Eve there was travelling toward the house another story--the drama of a man's life.

At the distance of a few hundred yards the sound of the sleigh-bells, borne softly into the room and to the rapt listeners, showed that the driver had turned out of the main drive and begun to encircle the house by that path which enclosed it as within a ring--within the symbol of the eternal.

Under old trees now snow-laden, past the flower-beds of summer, past the long branches of flowering shrubs and of roses that no longer scattered their petals, but now dropped the flowers of the sky, past thoughts and memories, it made its way: as for one who doubles back upon the track of experience with a new purpose and revisits the past as he turns away from it toward another future. Through the darkness, across the fresh snow, on this night of the anniversary of home life, there and on this final Christmas Eve after which all would soon vanish, he drew this band--binding together all the lives there grouped--putting about them the ring of oneness.

That mournful melody of secrecy and darkness began to die out. Fainter and fainter it pulsed through the air. At the gate it was barely heard and then it was not heard: was it gone or was it waiting there?

By the chimney-side there were faint noises.

"He is gone!" whispered Elizabeth with one intense breath.

V

WHEN A FATHER FINDS OUT ABOUT A SON

CHRISTMAS had passed, bringing up the train of its predecessors--the merry and sad parade of the years.

It departed a little changed, and it left the whole world a little changed by the new work of new children--by that innumerable army of the young who are ever usurping the earth from the old; who successively refashion it in their own image, and in turn growing old themselves leave it to the young again to refashion still further: leaving it always to the child, the destroyer and saviour of the race.

And yet it is the Child that amid all changes believes that it will escape all change.

Christmas had passed, and human nature had settled once more to routine and commonplace, starting to travel across another restful desert of ordinary days before it should reach another exhausting oasis of the unusual. The young broke or threw away or forgot their toys; the old lifted once more to their backs familiar burdens with a kind of fretful or patient liking for them.

The sun began to return with his fresh and ancient smiling. For a while after Christmas snows were deeper and dryer, but then began to fall more rarely and melt more swiftly. February turned its unfinished work over to March, and March received it, and among other things brought to its service winds and daffodils. The last flakes of snow as they sank through the sod passed the snowdrop pushing upward--the passing of the snowdrops of winter and of spring. In the woods wherever there was mistletoe--that undying pledge of verdure into which naturalists of old believed that the whole spirit of the tree had retreated for safety from the storm--wherever there was mistletoe, it began to withdraw from sight and hide itself amid young leaves bursting forth everywhere--universal annunciation that what had seemed dead yet lived. Out of the ground things sprouted and rose that had never lived before; but on old stocks also, as on the tops of old trees about the doctor's house, equally there was spring. For while there is life, there is youth; and as long as there is youth, there is growth. Life is youth, wholly youth; and death is not the end of age nor of old age, but only the ending of youth: of briefer youth or extended youth, but always of youth.

Ploughing began in the Kentucky fields, and after the plough the sower went forth to sow. Dr. Birney as he drove along turnpikes and lanes looked out of his buggy and saw him. Beside him was his son, and the doctor was busy sowing also, sowing the seeds of right suggestion. Sometimes they met child patients whom the doctor had brought through the epidemic, they stopped and chatted triumphantly.

Altogether it was springtime for the doctor for more reasons than one. There was a change in him. He looked younger and he was younger. The weight as of a glacier had melted away from him. A new verdure of joy started forth. The beauty and happiness of the country about him found counterpart and response in his own nature.

One day as the two were driving across a fine growing landscape the doctor was trying to impart a larger idea of service; and so he was saying that there were three fathers: he was the first father--to be looked to for counsel and guidance and protection: this father was to be served loyally; he must be fought for if there were need, died for. But by and by the first father would step aside and a second take his place, much greater, more powerful--the fatherland. For this second father also his listener must be ready to fight, to die; he must look to it for guidance and safety. Then again in time the second father would disappear and the third Father would take him in hand--the Father of all things.

"And then I'll have to fight and die for the third Father."

"I am not so sure about the fighting and the dying," said the doctor with a quick, happy laugh.

"And after the third Father--who gets me next? When He is done with me, then what?"

"I am not so sure about that, either," admitted the doctor. "The third Father will keep you a long time; and as all the troops are his, there may be nobody to fight: but He'll make you a good soldier!"

* * * * *

Thus during these days, each in his own way was putting forth new growth; and now there arrived a morning when the son was to show how well grown he was and how faithfully things sown in him were maturing.

At breakfast for some lack of fine manners he received instructions from his mother. By way of grateful acknowledgment, he laid down his knife and fork and stiffened his back against his chair and looked at her steadily:--

"I don't see what you have to do with my manners," he said, as though the opportunity had come at last for him to speak his mind on the family situation. "You've spoiled everything for us. You ought never to have been my mother. Mrs. Ousley ought to have been my mother." And then he looked at his father for approval that he had brought the truth out at last.

The doctor at the beginning of that utterance had started toward him with the quick movement of one who tries to shut a door through which a hurricane has begun to rush. Now without a word he rose from the table and grasping the boy by the wrist led him from the room.

As the door closed behind them, a loud ringing laugh was heard as though the two were going off to enjoy something together. Then another door was closed, and then there resounded through the silence of all the rooms a loud startled scream; not so much of pain but of bewilderment, of amazement, of grief of mind, of a puzzle in the brain. Then there were other sounds, other sounds, other sounds. And then one long continued sound--low, piteous, inconsolable.

The spring advanced; tide of new life overflowed the land. Dr. Birney and his boy were seen driving on all bright days: not toward the sick necessarily; sometimes they were on their way to a creek or pond to fish.

There was a tragic change in the doctor, and there was a grave change in his son. The father's face began to show the responsibility of handling a case that was becoming more difficult; on a landscape of growing things--growing with the irresistible force of Nature, how was he to arrest the growth of things in the nature of a child? And the boy was beginning in his way to consider the danger of too much devotion to a father, too blind an imitation of him. In his way he was trying to get clear hold of this problem of how to imitate and how not to imitate. Something was gone between them; not affection, but peace. Each was puzzled by the other, and each knew the other was puzzled. How completely they jerked shining fish out of the lucent water; but as each dropped his hook into the sea of character, neither felt assured what he might draw up. At times in the doctor's eyes there was an expression too sad to be seen in any father's; and in the boy's was the look of the first deterioration in life--the defeat of being punished for what he thought was right.

Late one cold rainy afternoon in April there were several buggies in Dr. Birney's yard, three of them belonging to physicians called into consultation from adjoining county seats. One of the phenomena which baffle the science of medicine had appeared on the doctor's threshold--the sporadic case. Long after an epidemic is over, by an untraceable path infection arrives. It is quite as if a bird that cannot migrate should be found unearned on the opposite coast of a sea.

There was little need of the consultation; the disease was well known, the treatment was that agreed upon by the profession; Dr. Birney himself was the most successful practitioner. A well-known disease, an agreed-upon treatment--but a rate of mortality.

Others came, not called: friends, neighbors, members of his Masonic order. During all these years he had slowly won the heart of the whole people, and now it turned to him.

* * * * *

The doctor watched the progress of the case like one who must now bring to bear the resources of a lifetime and of a life; who must cast the total of skill and of influence on the side of the vital forces.

As the disease ran on in its course, to him it became more and more a question of how the issue would turn upon so-called little things, as the recovery of a patient is probably sometimes secured by merely turning him from side to side, from back to stomach.

It was his problem how to drop into one scale or the other scale of the childish balances some almost imponderable weight, as when good tidings arriving save a life, as when bad news held back saves a life; as when the removal of an injustice from a sensitive spirit saves a life; as when the healing of a wound of the mind in the very extremity saves a life.

He felt that before him now were oscillating those delicate balances, never quite in equilibrium: a joy dropped into one, a sorrow dropped into the other--some pennyweight of new peace, some grain of additional worry! The shadows collected on one side, sunbeams gathered on the other.

"Now then," he thought within himself, "now then is the hour when I must be sunlight to him--not shadow!"

He watched the look in his little boy's eyes; he noted the presence of things weighing heavily. There was a tangle, a perplexity, a tossing of the head from side to side on the pillow--as if to turn quickly away from things seen.

"Do I cast a light on him? Do I cast a shadow? Does my presence here by him bring tranquillity, rest, sound sleep? As he sees into me, does what he sees strengthen? Was his chastisement that morning a sunbeam? It had not struck him like a sunbeam; it had not fallen in that way! The chill in the house all these years--had that been vital warmth to him?"

There now came out the meaning of all that exaggeratedly careful training: the exercise, the outdoor life, everything: it was the attempt to develop robust health on a foundation not robust: everything went back to the poor start: each child had been born delicate.

At intervals during the illness there were bits of talk. One night the doctor rose from the bedside and brought a glass of pure fresh water and administered a spoonful and watched the swallowing and the expression:--

"Does it taste bitter?"

"Pretty bitter. You can't say that I didn't take your nasty old doses, can you?"

"Don't talk! You mustn't talk."

"I'd feel better if I did talk--if I could get it out of me."

"Then talk! What is it? Out with it!"

But the face was jerked quickly away with that motion of wishing to look in another direction.

Some nights there was delirium. Through the brain rolled clouds of fantasies:--

"_... If I knew how it comes out between you and Mrs. Ousley...._"

On these dark rolling clouds the father tried to throw a beam of peace: and it was no moment to hold back any of the truth:--

"_It is all over!... There is nothing of it._"

"_I wish I had known it sooner: it bothered me...._"

At another time more fantasies:--

"_... Not on the cheek! You're no father of mine if it's on the cheek...._"

At another time:--

"... _Suppose I never grow up and Elizabeth does. How is that? I wouldn't like that. How do you straighten that out?_"

"_I can't straighten that out._"

"_Then I can't straighten it out, either._"

* * * * *

"So young--so young!" muttered the doctor. "I was pretty old!"

One warm night the doctor walked out of doors. The south wind blew softly in his face, lifting his hair.

All round the house in yard and garden and farther away in the woods and fields everything was growing. It was a night when the earth seemed given up to the festival of youth: it was the hour of youth: of its triumph in Nature.

Little aware of where his feet carried him, he was now in the garden and now in the yard. And in the garden, low down, how sturdy little things were growing: the little radishes, the young beets, the beans--those children of the earth, flawless in their descent and environment--with what unarrestable force they were growing! Afterwards in the yard he passed some beds of lilies of the valley--most delicate breath of all flowers: how fragile but how strong, how safe in their unsullied parentage, in their ample wedlock!

All about the house the steady rush of the young! And within it--as a mausoleum--the youth of all youth for him--stopped!

* * * * *

Most obedient and well-trained and irresponsible Death! Thou hast no grudge against us nor bearest toward any of us malice nor ill-will! Thou stayest away as long as thou canst and never comest till thou must! Thou visitant without will of thine own! Quickening Death, that also givest to the will of another not the shock of death, but the shock of new life!

There loomed in the darkness before the doctor as he wandered about a true picture: an ancient people in an ancient land weighed upon by their transgressions which they could neither transfer to one another nor lay upon mother earth. So once a year one of them in behalf of himself and the rest chose an exemplar of their faithful flocks and herds, and folding his hands upon its head laid upon it the burden of guilt and shame, and then had it led out of the camp--to wild waste places where no one dwelt--"_to a land not inhabited_."

... And now he had sent away his son into the eternal with his own life faults and failings on him....

He turned back into the house--passed through the sick room--passed through his library, passed the portrait of his wife in her bridal veil--passed down the hall--knocked at her door and opened it wide and stood in the opening:--

"... My wife, I have come to you...! Will you come to him...?"

VI

LIVING OUT THE YEARS

AN afternoon of early summer, at the edge of a quiet Kentucky town, on the slope of a grassy hillside within one of those dreamy enclosures where our earthly dreams are ended, the sunlight began to descend slantingly for the first time--as on white silvery wings--upon a newly placed memorial for a child. Across the top of the memorial was carved a single legend hoary with the guilt and shame of men and women of centuries long since gone. Beside the memorial stood a young evergreen as the living forest substitute of him sleeping below: it was of about his age and height. The ancient stone with its legend of atonement and the young tree thus brought together stood there as if the offending and the innocent had come to one of their meeting-places--and in life they meet so often.

Tree and mound and marble stood within an open enclosure of turf encircled at a score of yards by old evergreens touching one another.

Early in the afternoon two of these evergreens had some of their lower interlapping boughs softly pushed apart, and into the open space there stepped excitedly a frail little figure in a frock of forget-me-not blue. Just inside the boughs which folded behind her like living doors so that she was screened from view, she hesitated for a moment and looked about her for the dreaded spot which she knew she was doomed to find. Having located it, she advanced with uncertain footsteps as though there could be no straight path for her to the scene of such a loss.

When she reached it, she sat hurriedly down, dropped her bouquet on the grass beside herself, jerked off her spectacles and pressing her hands to her eyes, burst into an agony of weeping. Long she sat there, helpless in her anguish. Once holding her hand before her eyes, she drew from her pocket a fresh handkerchief; she had brought two: she knew her tears would be many.

At last she dried her red swollen eyes and brushed back from her temples the long sunny strands of wind-woven hair; she put on her glasses and picked up her little round brilliant country picnic bouquet; and with quivering lips and quivering nostrils looked where she must place it. With tear-wet forefinger and thumb she forced the flowers apart on one side and peeped at the card pushed deep within within--"From Elizabeth."

She got up then and went slowly away, fading out behind the pines like a little wandering strip of heaven's remembering blue.

* * * * *

Later in the afternoon the sound of slowly approaching wheels sounded on the gravel of the drive that wound near: then a carriage stopped. A minute afterwards there appeared within the open enclosure a woman in black, thickly veiled, bringing an armful of flowers. Some yards behind her a man followed in deep mourning also, bareheaded, his hat in his hand at his side--the soldierly figure of a man squaring himself against adversity, but stricken and bowed at his post. They did not advance side by side as those who walk most in unison when they are most bereaved and draw closer together as fate draws nearer.

When she reached the mound, she turned toward him and waited; and when he came up, without a word she held the flowers out to him. She held them out to him with silence and with what a face under her veil--with what a look out of the wife's and mother's eyes--there was none to see. He gently pushed the flowers back toward her, mutely asking of her some charity for the sake of all; so that, consenting, she turned to arrange them. As she did so, she became conscious at last of what hitherto she had perceived with her eyes only: the happy little bouquet of a child left on the sod. And suddenly there fell upon her veil and hung enmeshed in it some heavy tears, of which, however, she took no notice. But she disposed the flowers so that they would not interfere with--not quite reach to--that token of a child's love which had never known and now would never know time's disillusion or earth's disenchantment.

When she had finished, she remained standing looking at it all. He moved around to her side; and they both with final impulse let their eyes meet upon the ancient line chiselled across the marble:--

"=Unto a Land Not Inhabited.="

He broke the silence:--

"I chose that for him: it is the truth: he has been sent away, bearing more than was his."

She looked at it a long time, and then bowed as if to set the seal of her judgment upon the seal of his judgment. And, moved by some pitiless instinct to look at things as they are,--the discipline of her years,--with a quiet resolute hand she lifted her veil away from her face. It was a face of that proud and self-ennobled beauty that anywhere in the world gives to the beholder of it a lesson in the sublimer elements of human character. There was no feature of reproach nor line nor shadow of bitterness, but the chastened peace of a nature that has learned to live upon itself, after having first cast itself passionately upon others; and that indestructible strength which rests not upon what life can give, but upon what life cannot take away: she stood revealed there as what in truth she was--heroic daughter of the greater vanished people.

She dropped her veil and turned away toward the carriage. He drew to her side and once--hesitatingly, desolately--he put his arm around her. She did not yield, she did not decline; she walked with him as though she walked alone. During all the barren bitter years she had not been upheld by his arm: her staff and her support had been her ideal of herself and of her people--after she had faced the ruined ideal of their lives together and her lost ideal of him. It was yet too soon for his arm--or it was too late altogether.

He withdrew it; and he continued to walk beside her as a man who has lost among women both her whom he had most wished to have and her whom he might most have had. And so they passed from the scene.

* * * * *

But throughout that long obscurity amid which we are appointed to pass our allotted years, it is not the order of nature that all stars within us should rise at once. There are some that are seen early, that move rapidly across our sky, and are beheld no more--youth's flaming planets, the influence of which upon us often leaves us doubting whether they were baneful or benign. There are other lights which come out to shine upon our paths and guide us later; and, thanks be to nature, until the very last new stars appear. Those who early have left them they love can never know what late radiance may illumine the end of their road. And only those who remain together to the end can greet the last splendid beacons that sometimes rise above the horizon before the dawn--the true morning stars of many a dark and troubled life.

They had half their lives before them: they were growing, unfolding characters; perhaps they were yet to find happiness together. She had loved him with a love too single and complete, and she loved him yet too well, to accept anything from him a second time less than everything. Happiness was in store for them perhaps--and more children.

The working out of this lay with them and their remaining days.

But for the doctor one thing had been worked out to the end: that year by year he was to drive along turnpikes and lanes--alone. That every spring he was to see the sower go forth in the fields; that with his whitening hair he was to watch beside the beds of sick children; and often at night under his lamp to fall asleep with his eyes fixed upon The World's Path of Lessening Pain.

* * * * *

When the two were gone, it was a still spot that afternoon with the sunlight on the grass. As the sun began to descend, its rays gradually left the earth and passed upward toward the pinnacles of the pines; and lingering on those summits awhile, it finally took its flight back to the infinite. Twilight fell gray; darkness began to brood; objects lost their outlines. The trees of the enclosure became shadows; these shadows in time became as other realities. The sturdy young evergreen planted beside the boy as his forest counterpart, having his shape and size, now stood there as the lad himself wrapped in his overcoat--the crimson-tipped madcap little fellow who had gambolled across the frozen fields that windy morning toward his Christmas Festival.

In this valley of earth he stood there holding upright for all to see the slab on which was to be read his brief ended tale:--

"=Unto a Land Not Inhabited.="

THE END

The following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author

MR. JAMES LANE ALLEN'S

The Bride of the Mistletoe

To which _The Doctor's Christmas Eve_ is a sequel, was described at the time of its publication as "_so exquisite that not a few of his admirers will hold it the best work he has accomplished_."

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Transcriber Notes:

Passages in italics were indicated by _underscores_.

Passages in bold were indicated by =equal signs=.

Small caps were replaced with ALL CAPS.

Throughout the document, the oe ligature was replaced with "oe".

Throughout the dialogues, there were words used to mimic accents of the speakers. Those words were retained as-is.

Errors in punctuation and inconsistent hyphenation were not corrected unless otherwise noted.

On page 114, "for the inhabitants" was replaced with "For the inhabitants".

On page 241, "who's" was replaced with "whose".

End of Project Gutenberg's The Doctor's Christmas Eve, by James Lane Allen