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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42923 ***
+
+                       THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE
+
+
+
+
+                             [Illustration]
+
+                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+                      NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
+                        ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
+
+                        MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
+                       LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
+                               MELBOURNE
+
+                   THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
+                                TORONTO
+
+
+
+
+                       THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE
+
+
+                _Secretum meum mihi_
+                                       FRANCIS OF ASSISI
+
+
+                                   BY
+                            JAMES LANE ALLEN
+
+           AUTHOR OF "THE BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE," "THE CHOIR
+                 INVISIBLE," "A SUMMER IN ARCADY," ETC.
+
+
+                               =New York=
+                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+                                  1910
+                         _All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+                            COPYRIGHT, 1910,
+                       BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+                               * * * * *
+           Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1910.
+
+
+                            =Norwood Press=
+                 J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
+                         Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+                              TO THE SOWER
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+
+
+THIS work now published under the title of "The Doctor's Christmas Eve"
+is the one earlier announced for publication under the title of "A Brood
+of the Eagle."
+
+
+
+
+    "The Doctor, Herbert and Elsie's father, our nearest neighbor,
+    your closest friend now in middle life--do you ever tire of the
+    Doctor and wish him away?"
+
+    "The longer I know him, the more I like him, honor him, trust
+    him."
+
+                                     --_The Bride of the Mistletoe._
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+                               PART FIRST
+
+                                   I
+                                                        PAGE
+            THE CHILDREN OF DESIRE                         1
+
+                                   II
+            WHEN A SON FINDS OUT ABOUT HIS FATHER         32
+
+                                  III
+            THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR                         69
+
+                                   IV
+            THE BOOK OF THE YEARS                        107
+
+                                   V
+            EVERGREEN AND THORN TREE                     195
+
+
+                              PART SECOND
+
+                                   I
+            TWO OTHER WINTER SNOWBIRDS AT A WINDOW       213
+
+                                   II
+            FOUR IN A CAGE                               233
+
+                                  III
+            THE REALM OF MIDNIGHT                        258
+
+                                   IV
+            TIME-SPIRIT AND ETERNAL SPIRIT               271
+
+                                   V
+            WHEN A FATHER FINDS OUT ABOUT A SON          285
+
+                                   VI
+            LIVING OUT THE YEARS                         297
+
+
+
+
+                                 PART I
+
+
+
+
+                       THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE
+
+
+                                   I
+
+                         THE CHILDREN OF DESIRE
+
+
+THE morning of the twenty-fourth of December a quarter of a century ago
+opened upon the vast plateau of central Kentucky as a brilliant but
+bitter day--with a wind like the gales of March.
+
+Out in a neighborhood of one of the wealthiest and most thickly settled
+counties, toward the middle of the forenoon, two stumpy figures with
+movements full of health and glee appeared on a hilltop of the treeless
+landscape. They were the children of the neighborhood physician, a man
+of the highest consequence in his part of the world; and they had come
+from their home, a white and lemon-colored eighteenth-century manor
+house a mile in their rear. Through the crystalline air the chimneys of
+this low structure, rising out of a green girdle of cedar trees, could
+be seen emptying unusual smoke which the wind in its gambolling pounced
+upon and jerked away level with the chimney-tops.
+
+But if you had stood on the hill where the two children climbed into
+view and if your eye could have swept round the horizon with adequate
+radius of vision, it would everywhere have been greeted by the same
+wondrous harmonious spectacle: out of the chimneys of all dwellings
+scattered in comfort and permanence over that rich domestic land--a land
+of Anglo-Saxon American homes--more than daily winter smoke was pouring:
+one spirit of preparation, one mood of good will, warmed houses and
+hearts. The whole visible heaven was receiving the incense of Kentucky
+Christmas fires; the whole visible earth was a panorama of the common
+peace.
+
+The two dauntless, frost-defying wayfarers--what Emerson, meeting them
+in the depths of a New England winter, might have called two scraps of
+valor--were following across fields and meadows and pastures one of the
+footpaths which children who are friendly neighbors naturally make in
+order to get to each other, as the young of wild creatures trace for
+themselves upon the earth some new map of old hereditary traits and
+cravings. For the goal of their journey they were hurrying toward a
+house not yet in sight but hardly more than a mile ahead, where they
+were to spend Christmas Day and share in an old people's and children's
+Christmas-Tree party on Christmas Night--and where also they were to put
+into execution a plot of their own: about which a good deal is to be
+narrated.
+
+They were thus transferring the nation's yearly festival of the home
+from their own roof-tree to that of another family as the place where it
+could be enacted and enjoyed. The tragical meaning of this arrangement
+was but too well understood by their parents. To them the abandonment of
+their own fireside at the season when its bonds should have been
+freshened and deepened scarcely seemed an unnatural occurrence. The
+other house had always been to them as a secondary home. It was the
+residence of their father's friend, a professor in the State University
+situated some miles off across fine country. His two surviving children,
+a boy and a girl of about their own ages, had always been their intimate
+associates. And the woman of that household--the wife, the mother--all
+their lives they had been mysteriously impelled toward this gentlewoman
+by a power of which they were unconscious but by which they had been
+swayed.
+
+The little girl wore a crimson hood and a brown cloak and the boy a
+crimson skull cap and a brown overcoat; and both wore crimson mittens;
+and both were red-legged and red-footed; for stockings had been drawn
+over their boots to insure warmth and to provide safeguard against
+slipping when they should cross the frozen Elkhorn or venture too
+friskily on silvery pools in the valley bottoms.
+
+The chestnut braids of the girl falling heavily from under her hood met
+in a loop in the middle of her broad fat back and were tied there with a
+snip of ribbon that looked like a feather out of the wing of a bluejay.
+Her bulging hips overreached the borders of the narrow path, so that the
+boy was crowded out upon the rough ground as he struggled forward close
+beside her. She would not allow him to walk in front of her and he
+disdained to walk behind.
+
+"Then walk beside me or go back!" she had said to him, laughing
+carelessly.
+
+She looked so tight inside her wrappings, so like a jolly ambulatory
+small barrel well hooped and mischievously daubed here and there with
+vermilion, that you might have had misgivings as to the fate of the
+barrel, were it to receive a violent jolt and be rolled over. No thought
+of such mishap troubled her as she trotted forward, balancing herself as
+lightly on her cushioned feet as though she were wind-carried
+thistledown. Nor was she disturbed by her selfishness in monopolizing
+the path and forcing her brother to encounter whatsoever the winter
+earth obtruded--stumps of forest trees, brambles of blackberry, sprouts
+of cane, or stalks of burdock and of Spanish needle. His footing was
+especially troublesome when he tried to straddle wide corn-rows with his
+short legs; or when they crossed a hemp-field where the butt-ends of the
+stalks serried the frost-gray soil like bayonet points. Altogether his
+exertions put him out of breath somewhat, for his companion was fleet
+and she made no allowance for his delays and difficulties.
+
+Her hands, deep in the fleece-lined mittens, were comfortably warm; but
+she moreover kept them thrust into a muff of white fur, which also
+looked overfed and seemed of a gay harmony with its owner. This muff she
+now and then struck against her flexed knees in a vixenish playfulness
+as one beats a tambourine on a bent elbow; and at a certain point of the
+journey, having glanced sidewise at him and remarked his breath on the
+icy air, she lifted it to her mouth and spoke guardedly from behind
+it:--
+
+"Remember the last thing Papa told us at the window, Herbert: we were to
+keep our mouths closed and to breathe through our noses. And remember
+also, my child, that we were to rely upon--_especially_ to rely
+upon--the ribs and the diaphragm! I wonder why he thought it necessary
+to tell us that! Did he suppose that as soon as we got by ourselves or
+arrived at the Ousleys', we'd begin to rely upon something else, and
+perhaps try to breathe with our spines and elbows?"
+
+Her eyes sparkled with mischief, and her laughter had the audacity of a
+child's satire, often more terrible in its small world than a sage's in
+his larger one. The instant she spoke, you recognized the pertness and
+precocity of an American child--which, when seen at its best or at its
+worst, is without precedent or parallel among the world's children. She
+was the image of a hard bold crisp newness. Her speech was new, her
+ideas were new, her impertinence was new--except in this country. She
+appeared to have gathered newness during her short life, to be newer
+than the day she was born. The air was full of frost spangles that
+zigzagged about her as she danced along; they rather seemed like
+particles of salt especially provided to escort her character. If it had
+been granted Lot's wife with tears of repentance to dissolve away the
+crystals of her curiosity and resume the duties of motherhood,--though
+possibly permeated by a mild saline solution as a warning,--that
+salt-cured matron might admirably have adapted herself to the decrees of
+Providence by producing Elsie.
+
+The boy as she administered her caution stopped; and shutting his own
+red mouth, which was like hers though more generous, he drew a long
+breath through his nostrils; then, throwing back his head, he blew this
+out with an open-mouthed puff, and a column of white steam shot up into
+the blue ether and was whirled away by the wind. He stood studying it
+awhile as it disappeared, for he was a close observer always--a
+perpetual watcher of the thing that is--sometimes an observer fearful to
+confront. Then he sprang forward to catch up with his sharp-tongued
+monitress, who had hurried on. As he came alongside, he turned his face
+toward her and made his reply, which was certainly deliberate enough in
+arriving:--
+
+"We have to be _taught_ the best way to breathe, Elsie; as anything
+else!"
+
+The defence only brought on a fresh attack:--
+
+"I wonder who teaches the young of other animals how to breathe! I
+should like to know who teaches kittens and puppies and calves and
+lambs how to breathe! How _do_ they ever manage to get along without
+country doctors among them! Imagine a middle-aged sheep--old Dr.
+Buck--assembling a flock of lambs and trying to show them how to
+breathe!" Judging from Elsie's expression, the lambs in the case could
+not have thought very highly of this queer and genial Dr. Buck.
+
+"But _they_ are all four-legged creatures, Elsie; and _they_ breathe
+backward and forward; if you are a two-legged animal and stand up
+straight, you breathe up and down: it's quite different! It's easier!"
+
+"Then I suppose the fewer legs a thing has, the harder it is to get its
+breath. And I suppose if we ventured to stand on _one_ leg, we'd all
+soon suffocate! Dear me! why _don't_ all one-legged people die at once!"
+
+The lad looked over the field of war on which it would seem that he was
+being mowed down by small-gun fire before he could get his father's
+heavy artillery into action. He decided to terminate the wordy
+engagement, a prudential manoeuvre of the wiser head but slower tongue.
+
+"Father is right," he declared. His manner of speaking was sturdy and
+decisive: it was meant to remind her first that he had enough gallantry
+as a male to permit her to crowd him out of the path; but that the
+moment a struggle for mental footing arose between them, he reserved the
+whole road: the female could take to the weeds! He notified her also
+that he stood with his father not only in this puzzling question of legs
+and parlous types of respiration, but that the men in the family were
+regularly combined against the women--like good organized against evil!
+
+But now something further had transpired. Had there been present on the
+winter fields that morning an ear trained to separate our complex human
+tones into simple ones--to disengage one from another the different
+fibres of meaning which always make up even the slenderest tendril of
+sound (as there is a cluster of grapes to a solitary stem), it might, as
+it noted one thing, have discovered another. While the boy asserted his
+father to be right in the matter they were debating, there escaped from
+him an accent of admission that his father was wrong--wrong in some far
+graver affair which was his discovery and his present trouble.
+
+Therefore his voice, which should have been buoyant, for the instant was
+depressed; and his face, which should have been a healthy boy's happy
+face, was overcast as by a foreign interference. You might have likened
+it to a small luminary upon the shining disk of which a larger body,
+traversing its darkened orbit, has just begun to project a wavering
+shadow. And thus some patient astronomer of our inter-orbited lives,
+sweeping the spiritual heavens for signs of its pendent mysteries, here
+might have arrested his telescope to watch the portent of a celestial
+event: was there to take place the eclipse of a son by a father?
+
+Certainly at least this weight of responsibility on the voice must have
+caused it to strike only the more winningly upon any hearer. It was such
+a devoted, loyal voice when he thus spoke of his father, with a curious
+quavering huskiness of its own, as though the bass note of his distant
+manhood were already beginning to clamor to be heard.
+
+The voice of the little girl contrariwise was a shrill treble. Had you
+first become aware of it at your back, you must instantly have wheeled
+to investigate the small creature it came from, as a wild animal quickly
+turns to face any sound that startles its instincts. Voltaire might have
+had such a voice if he had been a little girl. Yet to look at her, you
+would never have imagined that anything but the honey of speech could
+have dripped from so perfect a little rose. (Many surprises await
+mankind behind round amiable female faces: shrews are not _all_ thin.)
+
+Instead of being silenced by her brother's ultimatum, she did not deign
+to notice it, but continued to direct her voluble satire at her
+father--quite with the air of saying that a girl who can satirize a
+parent is not to be silenced by a son.
+
+"... forever telling us that American children must have the newest and
+best way of doing everything.... My, my, my! The working of our jaws!
+And the drinking and the breathing; and the stretching and the bending:
+developing everything we have--and everything we haven't! I am even
+trying now to find an original American way to go to sleep at night and
+to wake up in the morning! Dear me, but old people can be silly without
+knowing it!" She laughed with much self-approval.
+
+For Elsie had already entered into one of mankind's most dependable
+recreations--the joy of listening to our own words: into that economic
+arrangement of nature whereby whatsoever a human being might lose
+through the vocal cords is returned to the owner along the auditory
+nerve! So that a woman can eat her colloquial cake times over: and each
+time, having devoured it, can return it to the storeroom and have it
+brought out as whole and fresh as ever--sometimes actually increased in
+size. And a man can send his vocal Niagara through his whirlpool rapids
+and catch it again above the falls! The more gold the delver unearths,
+the more he can empty back into the thinking mine. One can sit in his
+own cranial theatre and produce his own play: he can be stage and
+orchestra, audience and critic; and he can see that the claque does not
+get drowsy and slack: it never does--in _this_ case!
+
+The child now threw back her round winter-rose of a face and started
+along the path with a fresh outburst of speed and pride. Access of
+impertinence seemed to have released in her access of vitality. Perhaps
+it had. Perhaps it always does. Perhaps life itself at the full is sheer
+audacity.
+
+The lad scrambled roughly along, and merely repeated the words that
+sufficed for him:--
+
+"Father knows."
+
+Suddenly he gave a laughing outcry, and stood still.
+
+"Look!" he called out, with amusement at his plight.
+
+He had run into some burdock, and the nettles had stuck to his yarn
+stockings like stinging bees--a cluster of them about his knees and
+calves. He drew off his gloves, showing the strong, overgrown hands of
+boyhood: they, like his voice, seemed impatiently reaching out for
+maturity.
+
+When he overtook his companion, who had not stopped, he had transferred
+a few of the burrs to his skull cap. He had done this with crude
+artistry--from some faint surviving impulse of primitive man to decorate
+his body with things around him in nature: especially his head (possibly
+he foresaw that his head would be most struck at). The lad was pleased
+with his caper; and, smiling, thrust his head across her path, expecting
+her to take sympathetic notice. He had reason to expect this, because on
+dull rainy days at home he often amused her with the things he did and
+the things he made: for he was a natural carpenter and toy-maker. But
+now she took only the contemptuous notice of disapproval. This morning
+her mind was intent on playthings of positive value: she was a little
+travelling ten-toed pagoda of holiday greed. Every Christmas she
+prepared for its celebration with a balancing eye to what it would cost
+her and what it would bring in: she always calculated to receive more
+than she gave: for Elsie, the Nativity must be made _to pay_!
+
+He resented her refusal to approve his playfulness by so much as a
+smile, and he came back at her by doing worse:--
+
+"Why didn't I think to bring all the burrs along and make a Christmas
+basket for Elizabeth? Now what will I give her?"
+
+This drew out a caustic comment quickly enough:--
+
+"Poor Elizabeth!"
+
+A child resents injustice with a blow or rage or tears: the old have
+learned to endure without a sign--waiting for God's day of judgment (or
+their first good opportunity!).
+
+He was furious at the way she said "Poor Elizabeth"--as though
+Elizabeth's hands would be empty of gifts from him.
+
+"You _know_ I have _bought_ my presents for Elizabeth, Elsie!" he
+exclaimed. "But Elizabeth thinks more of what I _make_ than of what I
+_buy_," he continued hotly. "And the less it is worth, the more she
+values it. But you can't understand _that_, Elsie! And you needn't try!"
+
+The little minx laughed with triumph that she had incensed him.
+
+"I don't expect to try!" she retorted blithely. "I don't see that I'd
+gain anything, if I _did_ understand. You and Elizabeth are a great deal
+too--"
+
+He interrupted overbearingly:--
+
+"Leave Elizabeth out! Confine your remarks to me!"
+
+"My remarks will be wholly unconfined," said Elsie, as she trotted
+forward.
+
+He scrambled alongside in silent rage. Perhaps he was thinking of his
+inability to reach protected female license. He may obscurely have felt
+that life's department of justice was being balked at the moment by its
+department of natural history--a not uncommon interference in this too
+crowded world. At least he put himself on record about it:--
+
+"If you were a boy, Elsie, you'd get taken down a buttonhole!"
+
+"Don't you worry about my buttonholes!" chirped Elsie. "My buttonholes
+are where they ought to be!"
+
+It was not the first time that he had made something of this sort for
+Elizabeth. One morning of the May preceding he had pulled apart the
+boughs of a blooming lilac bush in the yard, and had seen a nest with
+four pale-green eggs. That autumn during a ramble in the woods and
+fields he had taken burrs and made a nest and deposited in it four
+pale-green half-ripe horse chestnuts.
+
+Elizabeth, who did not amount to much in this world but breath and a
+soft cloud of hair and sentiment, had loyally carried it off to her
+cabinet of nests. These were duly arranged on shelves, and labelled
+according to species and life and love: "The Meadow Lark's"--"The
+Blue-bird's"--"The Orchard Oriole's"--"The Brown Thrasher's"; on and on
+along the shelves. At the end of a row she placed this treasured
+curiosity, and inscribed it, "An Imitation by a Young Animal."
+
+Elizabeth's humor was a mild beam.
+
+Do country children in that part of the world make such playthings now?
+Do they still look to wild life and not wholly to the shops of cities
+for the satisfying of their instincts for toys and games and fancies?
+
+Do alder stalks still race down dusty country lanes as thoroughbred
+colts, afterwards to be tied in their stalls in fence corners with
+halters of green hemp? Does any little rustic instrument-maker now
+draw melodies from a homegrown corn-stalk? Across rattling
+window-panes of old farm-houses--between withered sashes--during long
+winter nights does there sound the æolian harp made with a hair from a
+horse-tail? Do boys still squeeze the red juice of poke-berries on the
+plumage of white barnyard roosters, thus whenever they wish bringing
+on a cock-fight between old far-squandered Cochins, who long
+previously had entered into a treaty as to their spheres of influence
+in a Manchuria of hens? Do the older boys some wet night lead the
+youngest around the corner of the house in the darkness and show him,
+there! rising out of the ground! the long expected Devil come at last
+(as a pumpkin carved and candle-lighted) for his own particular urchin?
+When in autumn the great annual ceremony of the slaughter of the swine
+takes place on the farms at the approach of the winter solstice,--a
+festival running back to aboriginal German tribes before the beginnings
+of agriculture, when the stock that had been fattened on the mast and
+pasturage of the mountains was driven down into the villages and
+perforce killed to keep it from starving,--when this carnival of flesh
+recurs on Kentucky farms, do boys with turkey-quills or goose-quills
+blow the bladders up, tie the necks and hang them in smoke-houses or
+garrets to dry; and then at daybreak of Christmas morning, having warmed
+and expanded them before the fire, do they jump on them and explode
+them--a primitive folk-rite for making a magnificent noise ages older
+than the use of crackers and cannon?
+
+Do children contrive their picture-frames by glueing October acorns and
+pine-cones to ovals of boards and giving the mass a thick coat of
+varnish? On winter nights do little girls count the seeds of the apples
+they are eating and pronounce over them the incantation of their
+destinies--thus in another guise going through the same charm of words
+that Marguerite used as she scattered earthward the petals of trust and
+ruin? Do they, sitting face to face bareheaded on sun-hued meadows,
+pluck the dandelion when its seed are clustered at the top like a ball
+of gauze, and with one breath try to blow these off: for the number of
+seed that remain will tell the too many years before they shall be asked
+in marriage? Do they slit the stems and cast them into the near brook
+and watch them form into ringlets and floating hair--as of a water
+spirit? Do they hold buttercups under each other's chins to see who
+likes butter--that is, mind you, _good_ butter! Romping little Juliets
+of Nature's proud courtyards--with young Montagues watching from afar!
+Sane little Ophelias of the garland at the water's brink--secure for
+many years yet from all sad Hamlets! Do country children do such things
+and have such notions now?
+
+Perhaps once in a lifetime, on some summer day when the sky was filled
+with effulgence and white clouds, you may have seen a large low-flying
+bird cross the landscape straight away from you, so exactly poised under
+the edge of a cloud, that one of the wings beat in shadow while the
+other waved in light. Thus these two children, following their path over
+the fields that morning, ran along the dividing-line between the
+darkness and the light of their world.
+
+On one side of them lay the thinning shadow of man's ancient romance
+with Nature which is everywhere most rapidly dying out in this
+civilization--the shadow of that romance which for ages was the earliest
+ray of his religion: in later centuries became the splendor of his art;
+then loomed as the historic background of his titanic myths and fables;
+and now only in obscure valleys is found lingering in the play of
+superstitious children at twilights before darkness engulfs them--the
+latest of the infants in the dusk of the oldest gods.
+
+On the other side blazed the hard clear light of that realism of human
+life which is the unfolding brightness of the New World; that light of
+reason and of reasonableness which seems to take from man both his
+mornings and his evenings, with all their half-lights and their
+mysteries; and to leave him only a perpetual noonday of the actual in
+which everything loses its shadow. So the two ran that morning. But so
+children ever run--between the fresh light and the old darkness of
+ever-advancing humanity--between the world's new birth and a forgetting.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+On the brother and sister skipped and bounded, wild with health and
+Christmas joy. Their quarrel was in a moment forgotten--happy children!
+The nature of the little girl was not deep enough to remember a quarrel;
+the boy's nature was too deep to remember one. Crimson-tipped, madcap,
+winter spirits! The blue dome vaulting infinitely above them with all
+its clouds pushed aside; the wind throwing itself upon them at every
+step like some huge young animal force unchained for exercise and rude
+in its good-natured play. As they crossed a woodland pasture the hoary
+trees rocked and roared, strewing in their path bits of bark and rotten
+twigs and shattered sprigs of mistletoe. In an open meadow a
+yellow-breasted lark sprang reluctantly from its cuddling-place and
+drifted far behind them on the rushing air. In a corn-field out of a
+dried bunch of partridge grass a rabbit started softly and went bobbing
+away over the corn-rows--with its white flag run up at the rear end of
+the fortifications as a notice "Please not to shoot or otherwise
+trespass!" Alas, that so palpable and polite a request should be treated
+as so plain a target!
+
+Once the little girl changed her trotting gait to a walk nearly as fast,
+so that her skirts swished from side to side of her plump hips with
+wren-like energy and briskness. Her mind was still harping on her
+father; and having satirized him, and adoring him, she now would fain
+approve him.
+
+"My! but it's cold, Herbert! Papa says it is not sickness that plays
+havoc with you: it's not being ready for sickness; and being ready
+depends upon how you have lived: it depends upon what you are; and
+that's where your virtue comes in, my child, if you have any virtue. We
+have been taught to stay out of doors when it is cold; and now we can
+come out when it is colder. We were ready for the crisis!" and Elsie
+pushed her nose into the air with smallish amusement.
+
+The boy gravely pondered her words about crisis, and pondered his own
+before replying:--
+
+"I wonder what kind of children we'd have been if we'd had some other
+father. Or some other _mother_," he added with a change of tone as he
+uttered that last word; and he looked askance at his sister to see
+whether she would glance at him.
+
+She kept her face set straight forward; but she impatiently exclaimed:--
+
+"Others, others, others! You are always thinking of _others_, Herbert!"
+
+"I am one of them myself! I am one of the others myself!" cried the boy,
+relieved that his secret was his own; and bounding suddenly on the earth
+also as if with a sense of his kinship to its unseen host.
+
+The question he had asked marked him: for he was one of the children who
+from the outset begin to ask of life what it means and who are surprised
+when there is no one to tell them. For him there was no rest until he
+solved some mystery or had at least found out where some mystery stood
+abandoned on the road--a mystery still. Her intelligence stopped short
+at what she perfectly knew. She saw with amazing clearness, but she
+beheld very little. Hers was that order of intelligence which is gifted
+with vision of almost terrifying accuracy--at short range: life is a
+thin painted curtain, and its depths are the painted curtain's depths.
+
+Once they came to a pair of bars which led into a meadow. The bars were
+of green timber and were very heavy. As he strained and tugged at them,
+she waited close behind him, dancing to the right and to the left so
+that there was a sound of mud-crystals being crushed under her
+tyrannical little fat feet.
+
+"Hurry, hurry, hurry!" she exclaimed with impatience. "We may run in the
+cold, but we must not stand still in the cold;" and she kicked him on
+the heels and pummelled him between the shoulders with her muff.
+
+"I am doing my best," he said, laughing heartily.
+
+"Your best is not good enough," she urged, laughing heartily likewise.
+
+"This bar is wedged tight. It's the sap that's frozen to the post. Look
+out there behind!"
+
+He stepped back, and, with a short run, lifted his leg and kicked the
+bar with his full strength. The recoil threw him backward to the ground,
+but he was quickly on his feet again; and as the bar was now loosened,
+he let it down for her. She stepped serenely through and without looking
+back or waiting trotted on. He put the bars up and with a spurt soon
+overtook her, for the meadow they were now crossing had been closely
+grazed in the autumn and there was better walking. They went up rising
+ground and reached one of those dome-like elevations which are a feature
+of the blue-grass country.
+
+Straight ahead of them half a mile away stood the house toward which
+they were hastening; a two-story brick house, lifted a little above its
+surroundings of yard and gardens and shrubbery and vines: an oak-tree
+over its roof, cedar-trees near its windows, ivy covering one of its
+walls, a lawn sloping from it to a thicket of evergreens where its
+Christmas Tree each year was cut.
+
+The children greeted with fresh enthusiasm the sight of this charming,
+this ideal place to which they were transferring their Christmas plans
+and pleasures--abandoning their own hearthstone. There lived their
+father's friend; there lived Harold and Elizabeth, their friends; and
+there lived the wife and mother of the household--the woman toward whom
+from their infancy they had been herded as by a driving hand.
+
+The tell-tale Christmas smoke of the land was pouring from its chimneys,
+showing that it was being warmed through and through for coming guests
+and coming festivities. At one end of the building, in an ell, was the
+kitchen; it sent forth a volume of smoke, the hospitable invitations of
+which there was no misunderstanding. At the opposite end was the parlor:
+it stood for the Spirit, as the kitchen for the honest Flesh: the wee
+travellers on the distant hilltop thought of the flesh first.
+
+They had no idea of the origin of the American Christmas. They did not
+know that this vast rolling festival has migrated to the New World,
+drawing with it things gathered from many lands and centuries; that the
+cooking and the feasting crossed from pagan England; that the evergreen
+with its lights and gifts came from pagan Germany; that the mystical
+fireside with its stockings was introduced from Holland; that the
+evergreen now awaiting them in the shut and darkened parlor of this
+Kentucky farm-house represented the sacred Tree which has been found in
+nearly every ancient land and is older than the Tree of Life in the
+literature of Eden.
+
+As far as they thought of the antiquity of the Christmas festival at
+all, it had descended straight from the Holy Land and the Manger of
+Bethlehem; this error now led to complications.
+
+The boy's crimson skull-cap had a peak which curled forward; and
+attached to this peak by several inches of crewel hung a round crimson
+ball about the size of the seed-ball of a sycamore. The shifting wind
+blew it hither and thither so that it buffeted him in the face and eyes.
+On this exposed height, especially, the wind raced free; and he ducked
+his head and turned his face sidewise toward her--an imp of winter
+joy--as he shouted across the gale:--
+
+"If people are still baking such quantities of cake in memory of
+Christmas after all these hundreds of years, don't you suppose, Elsie,
+that the Apostles must have been fearful cake-eaters? To have left such
+an impression on the world! Cake _is_ a kind of sacred thing at home
+even yet, isn't it? A fine cake looks still as if it was baked for an
+Apostle! Doesn't it? Now doesn't it?"
+
+Elsie did not reply at once. Her younger brother was growing into the
+habit of saying unexpected things. Once after he had left the breakfast
+table, she had heard her father say to her mother that he had genius.
+Elsie was not positive as to all that genius comprised; but she at once
+decided that if she did not possess genius she did not wish genius.
+However she packed herself off to her room and thought further about
+this unpleasant parental discrimination.
+
+"If he has genius," she said finally, "at least he did not get it from
+_them_," and there was a triumph in her eye. "I see not the slightest
+sign of genius in either of _them:_ he must have gotten it from our
+grandparents--never from _them_!"
+
+From that moment she had begun to oppose her mind to his mind as a
+superior working instrument in a practical world. Whenever he put forth
+a fancy, she put forth a fact; and the fact was meant to extinguish the
+fancy as a muffler puts out a candle. After a moment she now
+replied--with a mind that had repudiated genius:--
+
+"Nothing is said in the New Testament, my child, about cake. The only
+thing mentioned is loaves and fishes. But they _do_ seem to have done an
+unconscionable amount of dining on bread and fish!" and Elsie had her
+own satirical laugh at the table customs of ancient Palestine as viewed
+from the Kentucky standard of the nineteenth century.
+
+The boy before replying deliberated as always.
+
+"They may not have had cake, but they had meat: because they said he sat
+with sinners at meat. I wonder why it was always _the sinners_ who got
+_the meat_!"
+
+Elsie could offer no personal objection to this: Providence had ordained
+her to dwell in the tents of flesh herself.
+
+"How could they feed five thousand people on five loaves and two fishes?
+How _could_ they? At one of those fish dinners!"
+
+"They did it!" said Elsie flatly. She saw the whole transaction with
+brilliant clearness--saw to the depths of the painted curtain. It was as
+naturally fact as the family four of them at breakfast that morning, fed
+on home-smoked sausages and perfectly digestible buckwheat cakes.
+
+"And twelve baskets of crumbs! That makes it worse! With bread for
+thousands everywhere, why pick up crumbs?"
+
+"Nothing is said about crumbs; they were fragments."
+
+"But if I've got to believe it, I've got to think how they did it! I've
+_got_ to! If I can't think of it as it is, I must think of it as it
+isn't! But I can't do anything with the loaves; I give up the bread.
+However, I think those two fish might have been leviathans. That would
+be only two thousand five hundred people to each leviathan. Many of them
+might not have liked leviathan. I wouldn't have wanted any! They could
+have skipped me! They could have had my slice! And the babies--they
+didn't want _much_! Anyhow, that's the best I can do for the fish"; and
+he had his laugh also--not an incessant ripple like hers, but a music
+issuing from the depths of him through joy in the things he saw.
+
+Elsie made the reply which of late was becoming habitual in her talks
+with him.
+
+"Don't begin to be _peculiar_, Herbert. You are too young to be
+_peculiar_. Leave that to old people!" and Elsie's mind glided off from
+the loaves and the fishes of Galilee to certain old people of her
+neighborhood from whose eccentricities she extracted acrid amusement.
+
+The boy's words were not irreverent; irreverence had never been taught
+him; he did not know what irreverence was. They merely expressed the
+primary action of his mind in dealing with what to him was a
+wonder-story of Nature. And yet with this same mind which asked of
+wonder that it be reasonable, he was on his way to the celebration of
+Christmas Eve and to the story of the Nativity--the most joyous, the
+most sad, the most sublime Nature-story of mankind.
+
+His unconscious requirement was that this also must be reasonable; if it
+were not, he would accept the portions that were reasonable and reject
+the others as now too childish for his fore-handed American brain.
+
+They were nearing the end of their bitter walk. The little girl as she
+hurried forward now and then strained her eyes toward the opposite ends
+of the house ahead; at the kitchen smoke which promised such gifts to
+the flesh; at the window-shutters of the darkened parlor where the
+Christmas Tree stood, soon to be decorated with presents: some for
+her--the little fat mercenary now approaching who was positive that
+during these days of preparation she had struck a shrewd bargain with
+the Immortal.
+
+The boy, too, looked at these windows; but especially he looked at
+another between them, from which perhaps Elizabeth was watching for him.
+
+Once he turned, and, walking backward, directed his gaze from this high
+point far across the country. Somewhere back there his father might now
+be stopping at a farm-house. A malignant disease was raging among the
+children of the neighborhood, some of whom were his schoolmates and
+friends; the holidays would bring no merry Christmas for them.
+
+Wherever his father might be, there an influence started and came
+rushing across the landscape like the shadow of a cloud. It fell upon
+him, and travelled on toward the house he was approaching; it
+disappeared within the house and fell upon the woman who so wonderfully
+moved about in it: a chilling mysterious shadow that bound the three of
+them--his father and himself and this gentle woman--together in a band
+of darkness.
+
+Then he faced about and ran on, longing the more ardently for Elizabeth:
+the path between him and Elizabeth lay before his nimble feet like a
+band of light.
+
+
+
+
+                                   II
+
+                 WHEN A BOY FINDS OUT ABOUT HIS FATHER
+
+
+ON the day preceding that twenty-fourth of December when his two
+weather-proof untrammelled children were rioting over the frozen earth,
+Dr. Birney met with an event which may here be set down as casting the
+first direct light upon him. Some reflected radiance may already have
+gone glancing in his direction from the luminous prattle of his
+offspring; some obscure glimpses must therein have bodied him forth: and
+the portraits that children unconsciously paint of people--what trained
+hand ever drew such living lines?
+
+A short stretch across the country from his comfortable manor house
+there towered in stateliness one of the finest homesteads of this
+region; and in the great bedroom of this house, in the mother's bed,
+there had lain for days one of his patients critically ill, the only
+child of an intense mother who was herself no longer young.
+
+Early that morning upon setting out he had driven rapidly to this house,
+gotten quickly out, and been quickly received through the front door
+thrown open to admit him. After examining the child, he had turned to
+the mother and spoken the words that are probably the happiest ever to
+fall from any tongue upon any ear:--
+
+"He is out of danger. He is getting well."
+
+At this intelligence the mother forgot the presence of another mother
+older than herself who had come to be with her during these vigils and
+anxieties. As the doctor, having spoken a few words to the nurse, passed
+out into the hall toward the hat-rack, she led him into the parlors; she
+pulled him down into a chair beside the one she took; she caught his
+hand in hers and drew it into her lap. She forgot that after all she was
+a woman and he was a man; she remembered only that she was a mother and
+he a physician; and unnerved by the relief from days and nights of
+tension, she poured out her quivering gratitude.
+
+The doctor with a warm light in his eyes listened; and he was flushed
+with pleasure also at his skill in bringing his case through; but she
+had scarcely begun before his expression showed embarrassment. Gratitude
+rendered him ill at ease: who can thank Science? Who can thank a man for
+doing his duty and his best? With a smile of deprecation he
+interrupted:--
+
+"A great surgeon of France centuries ago was accustomed to say of a
+convalescent patient: 'God cured him; I dressed him.' I do not know
+whether, if I dared speak for the science of medicine near the close of
+the nineteenth century, I could say that. That is not the language of
+science now. If science thanks anything, it thanks other sciences and
+respects itself. But I will say that I might not have been able to save
+the life of your son if he had not been a healthy child--and a happy
+one; for happiness in a child is of course one of its signs of health.
+In his case I did not have to treat a patient with a disease; I had
+merely to treat a disease in a patient: and there is a great difference.
+The patient kept out of the case altogether, or in so far as he entered
+it, he entered it as my assistant. But if he had not been healthy and
+happy, the result might have been--well, different."
+
+The mother's face became more radiant.
+
+"If his health and happiness helped him through," she exclaimed, "then
+his mother enters into the case; for his health was his birthright from
+his parents; and his happiness--on account of the absence of his father
+during most of his life when he has been awake--has been a gift from his
+mother. He has lived with Happiness; Happiness has been before his eyes;
+Happiness has filled his ears; Happiness has held him in its arms;
+Happiness has danced for his feet; Happiness has rocked him to sleep;
+Happiness has smiled over him when he awoke. He has not known anything
+but Happiness because Happiness has been his mother. And so, if he owes
+the preservation of his life to Happiness, he owes it to the instinct of
+maternal imitation."
+
+The doctor had heard this carolling of maternity with full
+approval--this heaven-rising skylark song of motherhood; but at the last
+sentence he pricked up his ears with disfavor and stopped smiling: with
+him these were marks that he had withdrawn his intellectual fellowship.
+The trouble was that he esteemed her a charming and irreproachable woman
+and wife and mother; but that he could accord her no rank as a
+scientist, no standing whatsoever; and therefore he must part company
+with her when she spoke for instincts. The instinct of maternal
+imitation--the vanity of it! That her sex could believe a child to be
+sent into this world by the great Mother of all wisdom and given so poor
+a start as to be placed under the tyranny of an instinct to imitate any
+other imperfect human being--man or woman.
+
+Perhaps it was one of his weaknesses, when he came upon a case of folly,
+to wish to perform an operation in mental surgery at once--and without
+anæsthetics, in order that the wide-awake intelligence of the sufferer
+might be enlisted against the recurrence of such a necessity.
+
+In a tone of affectionate forbearance he now said:--
+
+"If only there were any such thing in Nature as the instinct of maternal
+imitation! Children have enough instincts to battle with and fight their
+way through, as it is. Let me beg of you not to teach your child
+anything as criminally wrong as that; and don't you be so criminally
+wrong as to believe it!"
+
+The mother's countenance fell. She released the doctor's hand and pushed
+her chair back; and she brushed out her lap with both hands as though
+his words might somehow have fallen into it, and she did not wish them
+to remain there. She spoke caustically:--
+
+"No intimate sacred bond between mother and child which guides it to
+imitate her?"
+
+She felt as though he had attacked the very citadel of motherhood; as
+though he had overthrown the tested and adopted standards of universal
+thinking, the very basic idea of existence; and she recoiled from this
+as a taint of eccentricity in him--that early death-knell of a
+physician's usefulness.
+
+But the doctor swept her words away with gay warmth:--
+
+"Oh, there is the intimate sacred bond, of course! No doubt the most
+intimate, the most sacred in this world. Believe in that all you can:
+the more the better! But we are not speaking of that: that has nothing
+to do with this imagined instinct of maternal imitation. Don't you know
+that a foundling in a foundling asylum as instinctively imitates its
+nurse? Don't you know that a child as instinctively imitates its
+stepmother--if it loves her? Don't you know that a child as
+instinctively imitates its grandmother?"
+
+The mother lay back in her chair and looked at him without a word. But
+then, Doctor Birney could be rude, curt, brutal. In proof of which he
+now leaned over toward her and continued with more gentleness:--
+
+"Do you not know that every child in this world begins its advance into
+life by one path only--the path of least resistance? and its path of
+least resistance is paved and lined with what it likes! As soon as it
+can do anything for itself, it tries to do what it likes, and it never
+tries to do anything else. When, later on, a time comes when it can be
+persuaded to do a thing that it has already desired _not_ to do, then
+its will comes into the case; it ceases to be simply a little animal and
+becomes a little human animal; it begins to be moral and heroic instead
+of unmoral and unheroic. But we are not talking about that. The best we
+can do is to call those earliest movements of its life the reaching out
+of its instincts and its taking hold of things that are like its own
+leading traits. The parallel is in Nature where the tendril of a vine
+takes hold of the matured branch of the same vine and pulls itself up by
+this. Thus one generation knits itself to another through the binding of
+like to like; and that is the whole bond between mother and child or
+father and child: it is like attaching itself to like under the
+influence of love. In this world every subject has two doors: you open
+one, and the good things come out. You open the other, and the evil
+things come out. This subject has its two doors: and I open first the
+door of Mother of Pearl--for you two pearls of mothers! Out of it come
+all the exquisite radiant traits that bind mothers and children. How
+many great men in history have begun their growth by attaching
+themselves to the great traits of their mothers? Then there is the other
+door. I am sorry to open it, but whether I open it or not, opened it
+will be: the Door of Ebony behind which are imprisoned all the dark
+things that bind parents and children. I am afraid I shall have to
+illustrate: if a child is born mendacious and its mother has mendacity
+as one of her leading traits, its little mendacity will flourish on her
+large mendacity. If it is born deceitful, and hypocrisy is one of her
+traits, hypocrisy in it will pull itself up by taking hold of hypocrisy
+in her. If it is born quick-tempered, and if ungovernable temper is one
+of her failings, every exhibition of this in her will foster its
+impatience and lack of self-control. These are some few of the dreadful
+things that come out: and if it is dreadful even to speak of them, think
+how much more dreadful to see them alive and to set them at work! Now
+let's shut the dark Door! And let us hope that some day Nature herself
+may not be able to open it ever again!"
+
+Hitherto the older of the two mothers, the mother of many children, had
+remained silent with that peculiar expression of patience and sweetness
+which lies like a halo on the faces of good women who have brought many
+children into the world. She now spoke as if to release many thoughts
+weighing heavily upon her.
+
+"It has always been my trouble--not that my children would not imitate
+me, but that they _would_ imitate me! I have my faults, for I am human;
+and I can endure them as long as they remain mine. They have ceased to
+give me much concern. I suppose in a way I have grown attached to them,
+just as I like people whom I do not entirely approve. But as soon as I
+see the children reproducing my faults, these become responsibilities.
+They keep me awake at night; sometimes they distress me almost beyond
+endurance. I know I have spent many anxious years with this problem. And
+I know also that the only times when their father has been overanxious
+about his failings has been when the boys have imitated _him_. He is
+always ready to lead a splendid attack on his faults, and they march at
+him from the direction of the boys!"
+
+"And so," said the doctor, laughing, "this instinct of parental
+imitation is an instrument safe to take by the handle, and dangerous to
+grasp by the blade!"
+
+He knew fathers in the neighborhood who were dreading the time when
+their sons might begin to imitate them--too far. And other fathers
+dreading the hour when their sons might cease to imitate their sires,
+and wander away preferably to imitate persons outside the family
+connection,--possibly an instinct of non-parental imitation!
+
+He rose to go in a mood of great good nature, and looked from one to the
+other of the two mothers:--
+
+"Perhaps Nature protected children from the danger of imitating by not
+making it their duty to imitate. And perhaps, as all parents are
+imperfect human beings, she may have thought it simple justice to
+children to confer upon them the right to be disobedient. At least, if
+there is an instinct to obey, it is backed up with an equal instinct not
+to obey; and the two seem to have been left to fight it out between
+themselves; and that perhaps is the great battle-field where incessant
+fighting goes on between parents and children. And at least disobedience
+has been of equal value with obedience in the making of human history,
+in the development of the race. For if children had simply obeyed their
+parents, if the young had been born merely to ape the old, there never
+would have been any human young and old. We should all still be apes,
+even if we had developed as far as that. You two ladies--of course with
+greatly modified features--might be throwing cocoanuts at each other on
+the tops of two rival palm-trees. Or--as the dutiful daughters of
+dutiful mothers--you might be taking afternoon naps in an oasis of
+dates--all because of that instinct of maternal imitation!"
+
+He hurried out to the hat-rack, making his retreat at the top of his own
+high spirits, they following; and with one glove on he held out his hand
+to the mother of the sick boy:--
+
+"I'll come in the morning to see how he is--and to see how his mother
+is. Now shake hands and say I have been a good doctor to you both."
+
+The mother's reply showed that bitterness rankled in her, as she yielded
+her hand coldly:--
+
+"Even if you have tried to destroy for me the intimate sacred bond
+between a mother and her child, I don't think you will be able to deny
+that my boy is a healthy and happy child because he is a child of a
+perfect marriage!" And she looked with secret and shaded import at the
+other mother.
+
+As the doctor drove out of the yard her last words lingered--_the
+healthy children of a perfect marriage_. And the look the two mothers
+had exchanged! It was as though each had a sword in her eye and touched
+him with the point of it--hinting that he merited being run through. How
+often during these years he had encountered that same look from other
+mothers of the neighborhood!
+
+"But if a wound like that could have been fatal," he reflected, "if a
+wound like that could have finished me, I should not have been here to
+save the life of her boy; he would have been dead this morning."
+
+Then his mind under the rigor of long training passed to happier
+subjects. His success in the case of this child was one more triumph in
+his long list; it renewed his grip on power within him.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+But for the necessity to provide for a people the services of general
+practitioner, Dr. Birney would have made a specialty of children's
+diseases. The happiest moment he experienced in his profession was a day
+such as this when he could announce the triumph of his skill and the
+saving of a young life. There was no sadder one than any day on which he
+walked out of the sick chamber and at the threshold met the gaunt
+ancient Presence, waiting to stalk in and take the final charge of the
+case given up by the vanquished physician. And when a few days later he
+sat in his buggy on the turnpike at the end of a procession--his healthy
+little patient stretched prostrate at the other end--he driving there as
+the public representative of a science that was ages old and that had
+gathered from all lands the wisdom of the best minds but was still
+impotent--on such a day he went down to his lowest defeat.
+
+He had such faith in the future of his science that he looked forward to
+the time when there would be no such monstrous tragedy on this planet as
+infant mortality. No healthy child would ever be allowed to die of
+disease; disease would never be permitted to reach it, or reaching it,
+would be arrested as it arrived. The vast multitude of physicians and
+surgeons now camped around the morning of life, waiting to receive the
+incoming generations on the rosy mountain-tops of its dawn--nearly all
+these would be withdrawn; they would move across the landscape of the
+world and pitch their tents on the plains of waning daylight; there to
+receive the ragged and broken army that came staggering from the
+battle-field, every soldier more or less wounded, every soldier more or
+less weary; there to give them a twilight of least suffering, their
+sundown of peace; and there to arrange that the great dark Gates closed
+on them softly.
+
+The conversation that morning disclosed among other facts the secret
+dread of Dr. Birney's life: that the time would come when his children,
+especially his boy, might begin to imitate him more than he desired. For
+a long time now he had kept under closest observation the working out in
+each of them of the law of like attaching itself to like; for already
+this had borne fruit for both on the vine of his own profession.
+
+A physician in a city may practise his profession with complete
+segregation from the members of his family; his office may be miles
+away; if he sees his patients in his house, his children are kept in
+another part of it. But out in the country the whole house is open; the
+children rove everywhere; if their father is a physician, they know when
+he starts and when he returns; and there is displayed in full view the
+entire drama of his life. And this life is twofold: for the physician
+must demonstrate as no member of any other profession is required to
+do--that whoever would best serve mankind must first best serve himself.
+In this service he must reach a solution of the selfish and the
+unselfish; he must reconcile the world's two warring philosophies of
+egoism and altruism. The outside world has its attention fixed solely
+upon the drama of the physician's public service to it; for the members
+of his own family is reserved acquaintance with the drama of his
+devotion to himself. Well for him and well for them if they do not
+misunderstand!
+
+Each of Dr. Birney's children responded to the attraction of a phase of
+his life--the phase that appealed to a leading trait in each.
+
+From the time of the little girl's beginning to observe her father she
+was influenced by what looked to her like his self-love: his care about
+what he ate and drank; his changing of his clothes whenever he came
+home, whether they were drenched or were dry; his constant washing of
+his hands; all this pageant of self-adulation mirrored itself in her
+consciousness. When he was away from home, she could still follow him by
+her mother's solicitude for his comfort and safety. To Elsie's mother
+the ill were not so much a source of anxiety as a husband who was
+perfectly well; and thus there had been built up in Elsie herself the
+domineering idea that her father was the all-important personage in the
+neighborhood as a consequence of thinking chiefly of himself.
+Selfishness in her reached out and twined itself like a tendril about
+selfishness in him; and she proceeded to lift herself up and grow by
+this vital bond.
+
+Too young to transmit this resemblance, she did what she could to pass
+it on to the next generation: she handed it down and disseminated it in
+her doll-house. There was something terrifying and grim and awful in the
+fatalistic accuracy with which Elsie reproduced her father's selfishness
+among her dolls, because it was on a mimic scale what is going on all
+over the world: the weaving by children's fingers of parental designs
+long perpetuated in the tapestry of Nature; the same old looms, the same
+old threads, the same old designs--but new fingers.
+
+One of the dolls was known as "the doctor"; the others were the members
+of his family and his domestics. This puppet was a perfect child-image
+of the god of self-idolatry, as set up in the person of a certain Dr.
+Downs Birney, and as observed by his very loyal and most affectionate
+and highly amused daughter Elsie.
+
+One day the doctor, quietly passing the opened door of the nursery, saw
+Elsie on the floor with her back turned to him faithfully copying and
+dramatizing some of the daily scenes of his professional life. His eyes
+shone with humor as he looked on; but there was sadness in them as he
+turned silently away.
+
+With the boy it was otherwise. The earliest notion of his father the boy
+had grasped was that of always travelling toward the sick--to a world
+that needed him. All the roads of the neighborhood--turnpikes, lanes,
+carriage-tracks, wagon-tracks, foot-paths--met at his father's house; if
+you followed any one of them long enough, sooner or later you would
+reach some one who was sick.
+
+When he was quite young his father began to take him in his buggy on his
+circuits; and at every house where they stopped, he witnessed this
+never-ending drama of need and aid. Such countenances people had as they
+followed his father out to the buggy where he was holding the reins!
+Such happy faces--or so sad, so sad! Souls hanging on his father's word
+as though life went on with it or went to pieces with it. Actually his
+father had no business of his own: he merely drove about and enabled
+other people to attend to their business! He one day asked him why he
+did not _sometimes_ do something for himself and the family!
+
+Thus a leading trait in him gripped that branch of his father's life
+where hung his service to others; and by this vital bond it lifted
+itself up and began to flourish in its long travel toward maturity. He
+literally took hold of his father, as a social implement, by the
+well-worn handle of common use.
+
+His presence in the buggy with his father was not incidental; it was the
+doctor's design. He wished to have the boy along during these formative
+years in order that he might get the right start toward the great things
+of life as these one by one begin to break in upon the attention of a
+growing boy. The doctor wanted to be the first to talk with him--the
+first to sow the right suggestions: it was one of his sayings that the
+earliest suggestions rooted in the mind of the child will be the final
+things to drop from the dying man's brain: what goes in first comes out
+last.
+
+And so there began to be many conversations; incredible questions;
+answers not always forthcoming. And a series of revelations ensued; the
+boy revealing his growth to a watchful father, and a father revealing
+his life to a very watchful son! These revelations began to look like
+mile-stones on life's road, marked with further understandings.
+
+Thus, one day when the boy was a good deal younger than now, his father
+had come home and had gotten ready to go away again and was sitting
+before the fire, looking gravely into it and taking solitary counsel
+about some desperate case, as the country doctor must often do. Being a
+very little fellow then, he had straddled one of his father's mighty
+legs and had balanced himself by resting his hands on his father's
+mighty shoulders.
+
+"Is somebody very sick?"
+
+The head under the weather-roughened hat nodded silently.
+
+"I wonder how it happens that all the sick are in our neighborhood."
+
+A smile flitted across the doctor's mouth.
+
+"The sick are in all neighborhoods, little wonderer."
+
+He said this cheerfully. It was his idea--and he tried to enforce it at
+home--that young children must never, if possible, make the acquaintance
+of the words _bad_ and _sad_--nor of the realities that are masked
+behind them. He especially believed that what the old are familiar with
+as life's tragic laws ought never to be told to children as tragic: what
+is inevitable should never be presented to them as misfortunes.
+
+Therefore he now declared that the sick are in all neighborhoods as he
+might have stated that there are wings on all birds, or leaves on all
+growing apple trees.
+
+"Not all over the world?" asked the boy, enlarging his vision in space.
+
+"All over the world," admitted the doctor with entire cheerfulness; the
+fact was a matter of no consequence.
+
+"Not all the time?" asked the boy, enlarging his outlook in time.
+
+"All the time! All over the world and all the time!" conceded the
+doctor, as though this made not the slightest difference to a human
+being.
+
+"Isn't there a single minute when everybody is well everywhere?"
+
+"Not a single, solitary minute."
+
+"Then somebody must always be suffering."
+
+The doctor nodded again; the matter was not worth speaking of.
+
+"Then somebody else must always be sorry."
+
+The doctor bowed encouragingly.
+
+"_Then I am sorry, too!_"
+
+This time the doctor did not move his head, and he did not open his
+lips. He saw that a new moment had arrived in the boy's growth--a
+consciousness of the universal tragedy and personal share and sorrow in
+it. He knew that many people never feel this; some feel it late; a few
+feel it early; he had always said that children should never feel it. He
+knew also that when once it has begun, it never ends. Nothing ever
+banishes it or stills it--that perception of the human tragedy and one's
+share and sorrow in it.
+
+He did not welcome its appearance now, in his son least of all. For an
+instant he charged himself with having made a mistake in taking the
+child along on his visits to the sick, thus making known too early the
+dark side of happy neighborhood life. Then he went further back and
+traced this premature seriousness to its home and its beginning: in
+prenatal depression--in a mother's anguish and a wife's despair. It was
+a bitter retrospect: it kept him brooding.
+
+The chatter was persistent. A hand was stretched up, and it took hold of
+his chin and shook it:--
+
+"There ought to be a country where nobody suffers and there ought to be
+a time; a large country and a long time."
+
+"There is such a country and there is such a time, Herbert," said the
+doctor, now with some sadness.
+
+"Then I'll warrant you it's part of the United States," cried the boy,
+getting his idea of mortality slightly mixed with his early Americanism.
+"Texas would hold them, wouldn't it? Don't you think Texas could contain
+them all and contain them forever?"
+
+The doctor laughed and seemed to think enough had been said on the
+subject of large enough graveyards for the race.
+
+"Why don't you doctors send your patients to that country?"
+
+"Perhaps we do sometimes!" The doctor laughed again.
+
+"Do you ever send yours?"
+
+"Possibly."
+
+"And how many do _you_ send?"
+
+"I don't know!" exclaimed the doctor, laughing this time without being
+wholly amused. "I don't know, and I never intend to try to find out."
+
+"When I grow up we'll practise together and send twice as many," the boy
+said, looking into his father's eyes with the flattery of professional
+imitation.
+
+"So we will! There'll be no trouble about that! Twice as many, perhaps
+three times! No trouble whatever!"
+
+He took the hands from his shoulders and laid them in the palm of his
+and studied them--those masculine boyish hands that had never touched
+any of the world's suffering. And then he looked at his own hands which
+had handled so much of the world's suffering, but had never reached
+happiness; happiness which for years had dwelt just at his finger-tips
+but beyond arm's reach.
+
+Not very long afterwards another conversation lettered another
+mile-stone in the progress of mutual understanding.
+
+It was a beautiful drowsy May morning near noon, and the two were
+driving slowly homeward along the turnpike. When the lazily trotting
+horse reached the front gate of a certain homestead, he stopped and
+threw one ear backward as a living interrogation point. As his answer,
+he got an unexpected cut in the flank with the tip of the lash that was
+like the sting of a hornet: a reminder that the driver was not alone in
+the buggy; that the horse should have known he was not alone; and that
+what he did when alone was a matter of confidence between master and
+beast.
+
+The boy, who had been thrown backward, heels high, laughed as he settled
+himself again on his cushion:--
+
+"He thought you wanted to turn in."
+
+"He thinks too much--sometimes."
+
+"Don't they ever get sick there?"
+
+"I suppose they do."
+
+"_Then_ you turn in!"
+
+"Then I _don't_ turn in."
+
+"Aren't you their doctor?"
+
+"I was the doctor once."
+
+"Where was I?"
+
+"I don't know where you were; you were not born."
+
+"So many things happened before I was born; I wish they hadn't!"
+
+"It is a pity; I had the same experience."
+
+The buggy rolled slowly along homeward. On one side of the road were
+fields of young Indian corn, the swordlike blades flashing in the sun;
+on the other side fields of red clover blooming; the fragrance was
+wafted over the fence to the buggy. Further, in a soft grassy lawn, on a
+little knoll shaded by a white ash, a group of sleek cattle stood
+content in their blameless world. Over the prostrate cows one lordly
+head, its incurved horns deep hidden by its curls, kept guard. The scene
+was a living Kentucky replica of Paul Potter's _Bull_.
+
+"Drive!" murmured the doctor, handing over the reins; and he drew his
+hat low over his eyes and set his shoulder against his corner of the
+buggy; he often caught up with sleep while on the road. And he often
+tried to catch up with thinking.
+
+The horse always knew when the reins changed hands. He disregarded the
+proxy, kept his own gait, picked the best of the road, and turned out
+for passing vehicles. The boy now grasped the lines with unexpected
+positiveness; and he leaned over and looked up under the rim of his
+father's hat:--
+
+"I hope the doctor they employ will give them the wrong medicines," he
+confided. "I hope the last one of them will have many a rattling good
+bellyache for their meanness to you!"
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+Then more years for father and son, each finding the other out.
+
+And now finally on the morning of that twenty-fourth day of December,
+the father was to witness a scene in the drama of his life as amazingly
+performed by his son--illustrating what a little actor can do when he
+undertakes to imitate an old actor to whom he is most loyal.
+
+That morning after breakfast the apt pupil in Life's School had been
+sent for, and when he had entered the library, his father was sitting
+before the fire, idle. The buggy was not waiting outside; the hat and
+overcoat and gloves were nowhere in sight; and he had not gotten ready
+his satchel which took the place of the saddlebags of earlier
+generations when the country doctor travelled around on horseback and
+carried the honey of physic packed at his thighs--like a wingless,
+befattened bumblebee. This morning it looked as though all the sick were
+well at last; it was a sound if wicked world; and nothing was left for a
+physician but to be happy in it--without a profession--and without
+wickedness.
+
+He threw himself into his father's impulsively opened arms, and was
+heaved high into his lap. Though he was growing rather mature for laps
+now; he was beginning to speculate about having something of a lap of
+his own; quite a good deal of a lap.
+
+"How is the children's epidemic to-day?"
+
+"Never you mind about the children's epidemic! I'll take care of the
+children's epidemic," repeated the doctor, pulling the long-faced,
+autumn-faced prodigy of all questions between his knees and looking him
+over with secret solicitude. "We'll not talk about sick children, but
+about two well children--thanked be the Father of all children! So you
+and Elsie are going away to help celebrate a Christmas Tree."
+
+"Yes; but when are you going to have a Christmas Tree of our own?"
+
+Now, that subject had two prongs, and the doctor seized the prong that
+did not pierce family affairs--did not pierce _him_. He settled down to
+the subject with splendid warmth and heartiness:--
+
+"Well, let me see! You may have your first Christmas Tree as soon as you
+are old enough to commence to do things for other people; as soon as you
+can receive into your head the smallest hard pill of an idea about your
+duty to millions and millions and millions of your fellow medicine
+takers. Can you understand that?"
+
+"Gracious! That would be a _big_ pill--larger than my head! I don't see
+what it has to do with one miserable little dead pine tree!"
+
+The doctor roared.
+
+"It has this to do with one miserable dead pine tree: don't you know yet
+that Christmas Trees are in memory of a boy who was once exactly your
+age and height--and perhaps with your appetite--and with just as many
+eyes and possibly even more questions? The boy grew up to be a man. The
+man became a teacher. The teacher became a neighborhood doctor. The
+neighborhood doctor became the greatest physician of the world--and he
+never took a fee!"
+
+"Ah, yes! But he wasn't a better doctor than _you_ are, was he? If he'd
+come into this neighborhood and tried to practise, you'd soon have
+ousted him, wouldn't you, with your doses and soups and jellies?"
+
+"Humph!" grunted the doctor with a wry twist of the mouth; "I suppose I
+would! Yes; undoubtedly I'd have ousted him! He could never have
+competed with me in _my_ practice; never! But we won't try that hard
+little pill of an idea any more. We'll drop the subject of Christmas
+Trees for one more year. Perhaps by that time you can take the pill as a
+powder! So! I hear you are going to attend a dancing party; we'll talk
+about the party. And you are going over there to stay all night. I wish
+I were going. I wish I were going over there to stay all night,"
+reiterated the man, with an outrush of solemn tenderness that reached
+back through vain years, through so many parched, unfilled years.
+
+"I wish so, too," cried the boy, instantly burying his face on his
+father's coat-sleeve, then lifting it again and looking at him with a
+guilty flush which the doctor did not observe.
+
+"Oh, do you! We won't say anything more about that, though I'm glad
+you'd like to have me along. Now then; go and have a good time! And take
+long steps and large mouthfuls! And you might do well to remember that a
+boy's stomach is not a birdnest to be lined with candy eggs."
+
+"I think candy eggs would make a very good lining, better than real
+eggs; and about half the time you're trying to line me with them, aren't
+you? With all the sulphur in them! And I do hate sulphur, and I have
+always hated it since the boy at my desk in school wore a bag of it
+around his neck under his shirt to keep off diseases. My! how he
+smelt--worse than contagion! Candy eggs would make a very good lining;
+even the regular soldiers get candy in their rations now. And they don't
+have to eat new-laid eggs of mornings! Think of an army having to win a
+hard-fought battle on soft-boiled eggs! They don't have to do _that_, do
+they?"
+
+"They do not!" said the doctor. "They positively do not! But we won't
+say anything more about eggs--saccharine or sulphurous. What are you
+going to do at the party?"
+
+"I am going to dance."
+
+"Alone? O dear! All alone? You'd better go skate on the ice! Not all
+alone?"
+
+"I should say not! With my girl, of course."
+
+"That's better, much better. And then what?"
+
+"I am going to promenade, with my girl on my arm."
+
+"On _both_ arms, did you say?"
+
+"No; on _one_ arm."
+
+"Which?"
+
+"Either."
+
+"That sounds natural! (Heart action regular; brain unclouded;
+temperature normal.) And then? What next?"
+
+"I'm going to take the darling in to supper."
+
+"Hold on! Not so fast! Suppose there isn't any supper--for the darling."
+
+"Don't say that! It would nearly kill me! Don't you suppose there'll be
+any supper?"
+
+"I'm afraid there will be. Well, after the darling has had her fatal
+supper? (Of course you won't want any!) What then?"
+
+"What else is there to do?"
+
+"You don't look as innocent as you imagine!"
+
+"You don't have to confess what you'd like to do, do you? Would you have
+told your father?"
+
+"I don't think I would."
+
+"Then I won't tell you."
+
+"Then you needn't! I don't wish to know--only it must _not_ be on the
+cheek! Remember, you are no son of mine if it's on the cheek!"
+
+"I thought I heard you say _that_ got people into trouble."
+
+"Maybe I did. I ought to have said it if I didn't; and it seems to be
+the kind of trouble that you are trying to get into. (Temperature rising
+but still normal. Respiration deeper. All symptoms favorable. No further
+bulletins deemed necessary.) Well, then? Where were we?"
+
+"Anyhow, I've never thought of cheeks when I've thought of _that_; I
+thought cheeks were for chewing."
+
+"Guardian Powers of our erring reason! Where did you get that idea--if
+sanity can call it an idea?"
+
+"Watching our cows."
+
+The doctor laughed till tears ran down his face.
+
+"You can't learn much about kissing by watching anybody's _cows_,
+Governor," he said, wiping the tears away. "Not about _human_ kissing.
+You must begin to direct your attention to an animal not so meek and
+drivable. You must learn to consider, my son, that hornless wonder and
+terror of the world who forever grazes but never ruminates!"
+
+For years, in talking with a mind too young wholly to understand, he had
+enjoyed the play of his own mind. He knew only too well that there are
+few or none with whom a physician may dare have his sportive fling at
+his fellow-creatures, at life in general. From a listener who never sat
+in harsh judgment and who would never miscarry his random words, he had
+upon occasion derived incalculable relief.
+
+"Anyhow, I have learned that cows have the new American way of chewing;
+so they never get indigestion, do they?"
+
+"If they do, they cannot voice their symptoms in my mummied ears," said
+the doctor, who often seemed to himself to have been listening to hue
+and cry for medicine since the days of Thotmes. "However, we won't say
+anything further about _that_! What else are you going to do over there?
+This can't possibly be all!"
+
+"To-night we children are going to sit up until midnight, to see whether
+the animals bellow and roar and make all kinds of noise on Christmas
+Eve. We know they don't, but we're going to _prove_ they don't!"
+
+"Where did you pick up that notion?"
+
+"Where did you pick it up when you were a boy?"
+
+"I fail to remember," admitted the doctor with mock dignity, damaged in
+his logic but recalling the child legend that on the Night of the
+Nativity universal nature was in sympathy with the miracle. All sentient
+creatures were wakeful and stirring, and sent forth the chorus of their
+cries in stables and barns--paying their tribute to the Divine in the
+Manger and proclaiming their brotherhood with Him who was to bring into
+the world a new gospel for them also.
+
+"I don't know where I got that," he repeated. "Well, after the animals
+bellow and roar and make all kinds of noise, then what?"
+
+"There isn't but one thing more; but that is best of all!"
+
+"You don't say! Out with it!"
+
+"That is our secret."
+
+The new decision of tone demonstrated that another stage had been
+reached in their intercourse. The boy had withdrawn his confidence; he
+had entered the ranks of his own generation and had taken his confidence
+with him. Personally, also, he had shut the gate of his mind and the
+gate was guarded by a will; henceforth it was to be opened by permission
+of the guard. Something in their lives was abruptly ended; the father
+felt like ending the talk.
+
+"Very well, then; we won't say anything more about the secret. And now
+you had better run along."
+
+"But I don't want to run along just yet. It will be a long time before I
+see you again; have you thought of that?"
+
+He reversed his position so as to face the fire; and he crossed his feet
+out beyond the promontory of the doctor's knees and folded his arms on
+the rampart of those enfolding arms.
+
+For a few moments there was intimate silence. Then he inquired:--
+
+"How old must a boy be to ask a girl?"
+
+A flame more tender and humorous burned in the doctor's eyes.
+
+"Ask her _what_?"
+
+"Ask her nothing! Ask _her_!"
+
+"You mean _tell_ her, don't you? Not ask her, my friend and relative;
+_tell_ her!"
+
+"Well, ask her and tell her, too; they go together!"
+
+"Is it possible! I'm always glad to learn!"
+
+"Then, how old must he be?"
+
+"Well, if you stand in need of the opinion of an experienced physician,
+as soon as he learns to speak would be about the right period! That
+would be the safest age! The patient would then have leisure to consider
+his case before being affected by the disease. You could have time to
+get singed and step away gradually instead of being roasted alive all at
+once. Does that sound hard?"
+
+"Not very! Do you love a girl longer if you tell her or if you don't
+tell her?"
+
+"I'm afraid nobody has ever tried _both_ ways! Suppose you try both, and
+let us have the benefit of your experience."
+
+"Well, then, if you love, do you love forever?"
+
+The doctor laughed nervously and tightened his arms around the innocent.
+
+"Nobody has lived forever yet--nobody knows!"
+
+"But forever while you live--do you love as long as that?"
+
+"You wouldn't know until you were dead and then it would be too late to
+report. But aren't you doing a good deal of hard fighting this
+morning,--on soft-boiled eggs,--though I think the victory is yours,
+General, the victory is truly and honestly yours!"
+
+"I can't stop thinking, can I? You don't expect me to stop thinking, do
+you, when I'm just beginning really to think?"
+
+"Very well, then, we won't say anything more about thinking."
+
+"Then do you or don't you?"
+
+"Now, what are you trying to talk about?" demanded the doctor angrily,
+and as if on instant guard. A new hatred seemed coming to life in him;
+there was a burning flash of it in his eyes.
+
+"Just between ourselves--suppose that when I am a man and after I have
+been married to Elizabeth awhile, I get tired of her and want a little
+change. And I fell in love with another man's wife and dared not tell
+her, because if I did I might get a bullet through me; would I love the
+other man's wife more because I could not tell her, or would I love her
+more because I told her and risked the bullet?"
+
+Pall-like silence draped the room, thick, awful silence. The father
+lifted his son from his lap to the floor, and turned him squarely around
+and looked him in the eyes imperiously. Many a time with some such
+screened but piercing power he, as a doctor, had scrutinized the faces
+of children to see whether they were aware that some vast tragedy of
+life was in the room with them. To keep them from knowing had often been
+his main care; seeing them know had been life's last pity; young
+children finding out the tragedies of their parents with one another--so
+many kinds of tragedies.
+
+"You had better go now," he urged gently. Then an idea clamped his brain
+in its vise.
+
+"And remember: while you are over there, you must try to behave with
+your best manners because you are going to stay in the house of a great
+lady. All the questions that you want to ask, ask me when you come back.
+Ask _me_!"
+
+The boy standing before his father said with a strange quietness and
+stubbornness, probing him deeply through the eyes:--
+
+"You haven't answered my _last_ question yet, have you?"
+
+"Not yet," said the doctor, with strange quietness also.
+
+The boy had never before heard that tone from his father.
+
+"It's sad being a doctor, isn't it?" he suggested, studying his father's
+expression.
+
+"What do _you_ know about sad? Who told _you_ anything about sad?"
+muttered the doctor with new sadness now added to old sadness.
+
+"Nobody _had_ to tell me! I knew without being told."
+
+"Run along now."
+
+"Now I'll walk along, but I won't run along. I'll walk away from you,
+but I won't run away from you."
+
+He wandered across the room, and stood with his hand reluctantly turning
+the knob. Then with a long, silent look at his father--he closed the
+door between them.
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+                         THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
+
+
+DR. BIRNEY stood motionless in the middle of the room with his gaze
+riveted on the door through which his son had lingeringly disappeared.
+
+Some one of the world's greatest painters, chancing to enter, might
+worthily have desired to paint him--putting no questions as to who the
+man was or what he was; or what darkening or brightening history
+stretched behind him; or what entanglement of right and wrong lay around
+and within: painting only the unmistakable human signs he witnessed, and
+leaving his portrait for thousands of people to look at afterwards and
+make out of it what they could--through kinship with the good and evil
+in themselves: Velasquez, with his brush moving upon those areas of
+lonely struggle which sometimes lie with their wrecks at the bottom of
+the sea of human eyes; Franz Hals, fixing the cares which hover too long
+around our mouths; Vandyck, sitting in the shadow of the mystery that
+slants across all mortal shoulders; Rembrandt, drawn apart into the
+dignity that invests colossal disappointment. Any merciless, masterful
+limner of them all in a mood to portray those secret passions which
+drive men, especially men of middle age, towards safer deeps upon the
+rocks.
+
+He had a well-set soldierly figure and the swarthy roughened face that
+results from years of exposure to weather--a face looking as if inwardly
+scarred by the tempests of his character but unwrinkled by the outer
+years. Both face and figure breathed the silent impassiveness of the
+regular who has been through campaigns enough already but is enlisted
+for life and for whatsoever duty may bring; he standing there in some
+wise palpably draped in the ideals of his profession as the soldier
+keeps his standard waving high somewhere near his tent, to remind him of
+the greatness that he guards and of the greatness that guards him.
+
+Not a tall man as men grow on that Kentucky plateau; and looking less
+than his stature by reason of being so strongly built, square-standing,
+ponderous; his muscles here and there perceivable under his loosely
+fitting sack-suit of dark-gray tweeds; so that out of respect for
+strength which is both manhood and manliness, your eye travelled
+approvingly over his proportions: measuring the heavy legs down to the
+boots; the heavy arms out to the wrists; the heavy square thick muscular
+warm hands; and the heavy torso up to the short neck rising full out of
+a low turned-down collar.
+
+In this neck an animal wildness and virile ferocity--not subdued, not
+stamped out, partly tamed by a will. Overtopping this neck a tremendous
+head covered with short glossy black hair, curling blue-black hair. In
+this head a powerful blunt nose, set like the muzzle of a big gun
+pointed to fire a heavy projectile at a distant target--the nose of a
+never-releasing tenacity. Above this nose, right and left, thick black
+brows, the bars of nature's iron purpose. Under these brows wonderful
+grayish eyes with glints of Scotch blue in them or of Irish blue or of
+Saxon blue; for the blood of three races ran thick in his veins and
+mingled in the confusions of his character: blue that was in the eyes of
+earlier Scottish men, exulting in heather and highland stag; or the blue
+of other eyes that had looked meltingly on golden-haired minstrel and
+gold-framed harp--eyes that might have poured their love into Isolde's
+or have faded out in the death of Tristan; or the blue of still other
+eyes--archers who had shot their last arrows and, dying, drew themselves
+to the feet of Harold, their blue-eyed king fighting for Saxon England's
+right and might.
+
+They were eyes that could look you to the core with intelligence and
+then rest upon you from the outside with sympathy for all that he had
+seen to be human in you whether of strength or of weakness--but never of
+meanness. Under the blunt nose a thick stubby mustache trimmed short,
+leaving exposed the whole red mouth--the mouth of great passions--no
+paltry passions--none despicable or contemptible.
+
+On the whole a man who advances upon you with all there is in him and
+without waiting for you to advance upon him; no stepping aside for
+people in this world by this man, nor stepping timidly over things. Even
+as he stood there a motionless figure, he diffused an influence most
+warm and human, gay and tragic, irresistible. A man loved secretly or
+openly by many women. A man that men were glad to come to confide in,
+when they crossed the frontiers of what Balzac, speaking of the soldiers
+of Napoleon, called their miserable joys and joyous miseries.
+
+But assuredly not a man to be put together by piecemeal description such
+as this: the very secret of his immense influence being some charm of
+mystery, as there is mystery in all the people that win us and rule us
+and hold us; as though we pressed our ear against this mystery and
+caught there the sound of a meaning vaster than ourselves--not meant for
+us but flowing away from us along the unbroken channels of the universe:
+still to be flowing there long after we ourselves are stilled.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+Thus he stood in his library that morning when his son left him, brought
+to a stop in the road of life as by a straw fallen at his feet borne on
+a rising wind--another harbinger of a coming storm.
+
+By and by not far away a door on that side of the house was slammed. The
+sound of muffled feet was heard on the porch and then the laughter of
+children as they bounded across the yard. As his ear caught the noises,
+he hurried to the window and looked out; and then he threw up the sash
+and hailed them loudly:--
+
+"Ho, there! you winter snow-birds without wings!"
+
+As the children wheeled and paused, he smiled and shook his
+forefinger:--
+
+"Remember to keep those two red mouths closed and to breathe through
+those two red noses!" and then as he recalled some exercises which he
+had lately been putting them through, he added with ironic emphasis,
+laughing the while:--
+
+"And when you breathe, remember to bring into play those two invaluable
+little American diaphragms and those two priceless pairs of American
+ribs!"
+
+The little girl nodded repeatedly to indicate that she could understand
+if she would and would obey if she cared; and putting her red-mittened
+finger-tips to her lips, she threw him a good-by with a wide sweeping
+gesture of the arms to right and left. And the boy made a soldierly
+salute, touching a hand to his skull-cap with the uncouth rigor of a
+veteran in the raw: then they bounded off again.
+
+The doctor drew down the sash and watched them.
+
+A hundred yards from the house the ground sloped to a limestone spring
+at the foot of the hill--a characteristic Kentucky formation. From this
+spring issued a brook, on the banks of which stood a clump of forest
+trees, bathing their roots in the moisture. Upon reaching the brow of
+this hill, the boy lagged behind his sister as though to elude her
+observation; then turning looked back at his father--looked but made no
+sign: a little upright pillar of life on the brow of that declivity:
+then he dropped out of sight.
+
+A few moments later up over the hill where he was last seen a little
+cloud of autumn leaves came scurrying. As they neared the wall of the
+house where the wind by pressure veered skyward to clear the roof, some
+of the leaves were caught up and dashed against the windowpanes behind
+which the doctor was standing. Had the sash been raised, they would have
+thrown themselves into his arms and have clung to his neck and breast.
+
+He did not know why, but they caused him a pang: those little brown
+parchments torn from the finished volume of the year: they caused him a
+subtle pang.
+
+He turned from the window, goaded by more than resolution, and crossed
+to his writing-desk on the opposite side: there lay the work mapped out
+for the morning. No interruptions were to be expected from his patients,
+though of course there might be new patients since accidents and
+illnesses befall unheralded. There would be no visitors--not to-day. In
+a country of the warmest social customs and of family ties so widely
+interknit that whole communities are bound together as with vine-like
+closeness, no one visits on the day before Christmas. In every little
+town the world of people crowd the streets and shops or busy themselves
+in preparations at home: out in the country those who have not flocked
+to the towns are as joyously occupied. No visitors, then. And the
+children were gone--no disturbances from their romping. The servants had
+put his rooms in order, and were too discreetly trained to return upon
+their paths.
+
+After breakfast, at the stable, he had given orders to his man for the
+day while he was having a look at his horses--well-stalled,
+well-groomed, docile, intelligent: at his gaited saddle-horse, at the
+nag for his buggy, at the perfectly matched pair for his carriage. As he
+appeared in the doorway of the stalls, each beast, turning his head, had
+sent to him its affectionate greeting out of eyes that looked like wells
+of soft blue smoke: each said, "Take me to-day."
+
+He was a little vain of being weatherwise, as is apt to be the case with
+country-bred folk: and at the last stable door, having studied the wind
+and the sky and the temperature, he had said to his man that the weather
+was changing: it would be snowing by afternoon. Usually in that latitude
+the first flurry of snow gladdens the eye near Thanksgiving, but sleighs
+are not often flying until late in December. There had been no snow as
+yet; it was due, and the weather showed signs of its multitudinous
+onset.
+
+He felt so sure in his forecast that he had instructed his man to put
+the sleigh in readiness. He himself went into the saddle-house and from
+a peg amid the gear and harness he took down the sleighbells. As he
+shook them roughly, he smiled as above that cascade of mellow winter
+sounds there settled a little cloud of summer dust. He observed that the
+leather needed mending--what he called "a few surgical stitches"; and he
+had brought the bells with him to the house and they now lay on the
+floor of his office in the adjoining room.
+
+He thought that if it should snow heavily enough he would use the sleigh
+when he started out in the afternoon. There were several sick children
+to visit on opposite horizons of his neighborhood. The sound of the
+bells as he drove in at their front gates might have value: it would not
+only mean the coming of his sleigh, but it would suggest to them the
+approach of that mysterious Sleigh of the World which that night they
+were expecting. Afterwards he was to go to a distant county seat for a
+consultation. His road home was a straight turnpike: it would be late
+when he returned, perhaps far in the night; and he would have the sound
+of the bells to himself--the bells and his thoughts and Christmas Eve.
+
+This plan of Dr. Birney's regarding the children laid bare one of his
+ideas as a physician. For years he had employed increasingly in his
+practice the power of suggestion. For years life as he sometimes
+surmised had employed the power of suggestion on him. He felt assured
+that in treating the sick there are cases where every suggestion of
+happiness that can reach a patient draws him back toward life: every
+suggestion of unhappiness lowers his vitality and helps to roll him over
+the precipice: the final push need be a very slight one. The melody of
+sleighbells falling on the ears of the sick children that afternoon
+might have the weight of a sunbeam on delicate scales and tip the
+balances as he wished: he believed that many a time the weight of a
+mental sunbeam was all that was needed to decide the issue.
+
+He looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock, and dinner was served at
+one, and he had a tranquil outlook for three hours of work. The only
+remaining source from which an interruption could have reached him was
+his wife. His wife!--his wife never--intruded.
+
+Not three hours, but two hours and a half, to be exact; for the
+dining-room adjoined his library, and every day at half past twelve
+o'clock his wife entered the dining-room to superintend final
+preparations for dinner: from the instant of her entrance concentration
+of mind ended for him: he occupied himself with things less important
+and with odds and ends for mind and body.
+
+She would draw the shades of the windows delicately to temper the light
+according as the day was cloudy or cloudless; she would bring fresh
+flowers for the table; she would inspect the clearness of the cut glass,
+the brightness of the silver, the snowiness of the napkins; she would
+prepare at the sideboard a salad, a sauce; she would give a final push
+to the chairs--last of all a straightening push to his. All the lower
+drudgery of the servants and all the higher domestic triumphs of her
+skill led to his chair--as to a kind of throne where the function of
+feeding reigned. With that final adjustment of the piece of furniture in
+which his body was to be at ease while it gorged itself, with that act
+of grade, the doors were opened; dinner was announced; he walked in, and
+faced his wife, and dined--with Nemesis.
+
+This pride of hers in housekeeping was part of her inheritance, of the
+civilization of her land and people: it was a little separate dynasty of
+itself. Often as the years had gone by he had been thankful that she
+could thus far find compensation for larger disappointment; it helped to
+keep her a healthy woman if it could not render her a happy wife. Near
+the sugar and the flour she could perhaps three times a day realize
+small perfections; she could mould little ideals and turn them out on
+the shelf and verify them with a silver spoon: an ideal life in the
+pantry for a woman who had expected an ideal life with him in library
+and parlor and bedroom and out in the world. It was all as if she sat at
+the base of Love's ruined Pyramids and tried to divert her desolation by
+configuring ant hills.
+
+And he was well aware that this pride of housekeeping was the least of
+all the prides that grouped themselves around that central humiliation
+of wifehood. He had sometimes thought that if, after her death, over her
+were planted a weeping willow, mere nutritive pride in her dust would
+force the boughs to reverse their natural direction and shoot upward as
+stiff as a spruce.
+
+The dining-room, in the old-fashioned Kentucky way, was richly carpeted;
+but the moment she set her foot within it, he could trace her steps as
+unerringly as though she had been shod with explosives. Likewise she
+sang to herself a good deal: (he had long ago diagnosed that symptom of
+nervous self-consciousness).
+
+When he had married her, voice and piano had been one of the resources
+he thought he would hold in reserve for the emptying years; music would
+fill so much rational silence. It was one of his semi-serious
+declarations that only two people more or less out of their senses could
+keep on talking to each other till death forced them to hold their
+tongues. But with tragic swiftness and sureness a few years after their
+marriage the music stopped, the piano was shut.
+
+More than that terminated. After two children were born, there were no
+more: that profound living music came to an end also. And perhaps one of
+the deepest desires of his nature was for that kind of long union with
+his wife and for many children: perhaps the only austerity in him was an
+austere patriarchal authority to people the earth and to bequeath the
+inheritance of it to his seed.
+
+When she had ceased singing to him soon after marriage, she had begun to
+sing to herself--habitually during this half-hour of proximity. The
+sound took up a fixed abode in his ear as there is a roaring in a
+seashell. He could hear it miles across the country; it was the loudest
+sound to him in this world--that barely audible self-conscious singing
+of his wife.
+
+During this interval also she addressed her commands to the maid in
+tones lowered not to disturb him. He could not hear the words, but there
+was no mistaking the tones! What beautiful, eager, victorious, thrilling
+tones--over a dish of steaming vegetables--over a savory toast! They
+forced him to be reminded that the nature of his wife was not a brook
+run dry; its leaping waters were merely turned away into another
+channel. Only when she spoke with him did the cadence of her tones sag;
+then all the modulations ran downhill as into some inner pit of
+emptiness.
+
+It was impossible for him to believe that the occasional chuckle and
+cackle of the maid during these whispered colloquies grew out of
+aspersions winged at him--at the hungry ogre, middle-aged, almost
+corpulent, on the other side of the wall; at the species of advanced
+gorilla, poorly disguised in collar and necktie and midway garments;
+and with wool and leather drawn over his lower pair of modernized
+walking hands! Yet the truth was undeniable that when dinner was
+announced and he went in, the maid, standing behind her mistress's
+chair, fixed her gaze on him with fresh daily delight in understanding
+or misunderstanding the wretchedness of the household.
+
+The first time he had ever seen this maid was one evening upon going in
+to supper. They were expecting guests, and his wife wore an evening
+gown. As he seated himself, he became aware almost without glancing
+across the table that something novel had arrived upon the
+scene--something youthful yet as immemorial as Erebus. Behind the
+glistening whiteness of his wife's bust with its cold proud dignity,
+there was something sable--birdlike--all beak and eyes--with a small
+head on which grew a kind of ruffled indignant feathers. He tried to
+take no further notice of the apparition, but could not escape the
+experience that several times during the meal he rescued his biscuit as
+from between the claws of a competing raven.
+
+In the course of time, as this combination of black and white refused to
+dissolve and rather coalesced into a duality holding good for meal
+hours, he felt impelled to characterize the alliance--to envisage for
+his own relief the totality of its comic gloom. So he called it his
+_Bust of Pallas_ and his _Nevermore_. And his _Nevermore_, perched
+behind his _Bust of Pallas_ at every function, fixed her dull stupid
+eyes on him in unceasing judgment. He was never quite persuaded of the
+human reality of her; never fully believed that she reached to the
+carpet: and he never got up from the table to see whether she cast a
+shadow on the floor; but he knew that it was the fowl's intention to
+cast whatsoever shadow it carried about with it _upon him_.
+
+She had become a critic of his domestic relations. This servant, this
+mal-arrangement of beak and eyes, with bare brain enough not to let
+plates fall and not to dangle her fingers in scalding water nor singe
+her head-feathers in the oven--this servant of his arraigned _him_ in
+his humanity! And if this servant, then all his servants. And if all his
+servants, then all the servants of the neighborhood. The whole Plutonian
+shore croaked its black damnation of him. Of _him_!--the leading citizen
+of his community, its central vital character who held in his keeping
+the destiny of a people! He had a vision of the august assemblage of
+them uplifted into the heavenliness of an African Walhalla--such as is
+disclosed in the last act of the _Tetralogy_--all gazing down upon him
+as a profaning Alberic who had raped the virgin Gold of marital love.
+
+On a near peak of especial moral grandeur, his _Nevermore_ stood in her
+supernal resentment of his wife's wrong. For whatever _Nevermore_ was
+not, at least, she was woman. And what woman fails to espouse any wife's
+dignity except the woman who supplants the wife? (Not even she; for if
+ever in turn her hour comes, her first outcry is, 'I might have known.')
+
+Dr. Birney did not have three hours for this morning's business, then,
+but two hours and a half; and forthwith beginning, he took from his
+breast-pocket a small book and transferred from it to a large diary his
+notes of visits to patients on the day preceding. This soon done, he was
+ready for the main work.
+
+It was now the closing week of the year when according to custom he
+posted the year's books; for he was his own secretary. By New Year's Day
+his accounts were about ready and new books were opened.
+
+He always took up with repugnance this valuation of his services. It was
+to him one of life's ironies that in order to live he must take toll of
+death. He must harvest his bread from the fields of tears. He must catch
+his annual treasure from those rainbows of hope that spanned weary
+pillows. He must fill his wine-jar by dipping his cup into the waves of
+Lethe. He must equip his very stable with the ferriage he had collected
+on the banks of the Styx.
+
+His heart was never in his bookkeeping; this morning he could barely fix
+upon it his thoughts; so that before commencing he allowed himself to
+turn the leaves, getting a distasteful bird's-eye view of this panorama
+of neighborhood suffering and mortality there outspread on the table.
+
+Two infants in January had had scarlet fever; so much for the infants
+and the fever. A boy had had measles; an assessment for measles. A girl
+had had mumps; the price of mumps. An old lady, going one bitter
+February afternoon to her hen-house to see whether the hens had begun to
+lay, had slipped on the ice-covered step and had fractured her hip-bone;
+damages for the friable hip-bone of the senile. A negro man, stationed
+in an ice-house to knock to pieces with an axe the blocks of ice as they
+were hauled from the pond, had had his feet frost-bitten. In April a
+stable-boy had been kicked in the groin and bitten in the shoulder by a
+stallion. This stallion, in whom survived the fighting traits of the
+wild horse and defiance of man as an enemy who had no use for him but to
+enslave him and work him to death, had already killed two stablemen. Too
+valuable for the stud to be himself killed, and too dangerous to be
+approached or handled, it was decided to destroy his eyesight; and the
+doctor had been called in to treat both stable-boy and stallion. There
+was a bill for his services to the boy; none for the stallion; he was
+not a veterinary. But it was his hand that had jabbed the long needle
+into those virile unconquerable eyes--leaving that Samson Agonistes of
+the herd whose only crime had been to reject civilization, as was his
+right. There was no one to put out the doctor's eyes, who also had
+rejected civilization: which was not his right.
+
+In June a lad, climbing a cherry tree with the ambition to capture the
+earliest cherries dangling scarlet, had fallen flat upon his back when
+the limb had split from the half-rotten trunk, thus jarring his spine.
+It was a bad case; he must now make out a good bill for it, otherwise
+the father would feel resentful.
+
+In harvest time one of his friends, a young farmer, overheated, went
+bathing too soon in a fresh-water pond--made cooler by a recent
+hail-storm; between the leaves lay a note from his widow, with its deep
+black border and its mourning perfume; she had asked for the
+account--had asked punctiliously to pay for a beloved young husband's
+fatal chill. In autumn two barefoot half-grown brothers were cutting
+ironweeds in a pasture with hemphooks; the elder by too heavy a stroke
+had sent his blade clean through a clump of weeds into the ankle of the
+younger, slashing it to the bone.
+
+Thus the record ran on as the doctor turned the pages in a preliminary
+survey of his chart of suffering. And then there were the cases of those
+coming into the world and the cases of those going out: birth-rates,
+death-rates. He must exact of Nature his fee for continuing the
+existence of the human race; and he must go about among his friends and
+neighbors and wring money out of them because those they loved best had
+merely paid their own decent debt to mortality.
+
+He dipped his pen into the ink, drew before him some blanks, and began
+to make out the bills. The rooms were very quiet and comfortable; winter
+sunshine entered through the windows; the Christmas wind frolicked
+outside the walls.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+To be forced to sit there and say to the world: My feelings have nothing
+to do with it: you must pay what you owe! Because all life is payment;
+everything is a settlement. There is but one that is exempt--Nature. It
+is only she who never fails to collect a debt but who never pays one.
+Who that has ever lived our common human life, borne its burdens, felt
+its cares, fought against its wrongs, who but knows that Nature is in
+debt to him? But what son of hers has ever been able to tear his due
+from her!
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+More may be learned about the doctor by an inspection of his rooms. Of
+these there were three, with a small fourth chamber as an ell in the
+house: in this ell there was a single bed, and here he sometimes
+slept--as nearly outside the house as it was possible to lie and still
+to be within it.
+
+The room in which he now worked was his library; communicating through
+an open door was his office; beyond the office through another open door
+was a third room in which were stored many personal articles of indoor
+and outdoor use.
+
+Beginning with his office, you derived the knowledge which any
+physician's and surgeon's office, if modern and complete, should afford.
+On one wall hung his diploma from a New York Medical College; on another
+a diploma from Vienna for post-graduate study and hospital work.
+
+The rooms taken together bore testimony in their entire equipment to a
+general outside truth: that the physician who lived in them was not a
+country doctor because he had been crowded by abler members of the
+profession out of the cities where there are many into the country where
+there are none: and this fact in turn had its larger historic
+significance.
+
+Almost within a generation a radical change has taken place in the
+relation of town and country as regards the profession of medicine. The
+old barriers which half a century ago separated the sick in the streets
+from the sick in fields and forests have been swept away. The city
+physician now twenty-five miles away can often arrive more quickly than
+a country doctor who lives five; and a surgeon can come in an hour who
+formerly needed half a day. But many now living with long memories can
+well remember the time when the country doctor ruled in his neighborhood
+as the priest in mediæval Europe swayed his parish. However remote, he
+was always sent for. His form was the very image of rescue, his face was
+the light of healing. As a consequence, the country often developed
+leaders in the profession. Instead of its being dependent upon the
+cities, these looked to the rural districts for many of the most skilful
+practitioners.
+
+This was strikingly true from the earliest settlement of the West on
+that immense plateau of forest and grass land which has long since drawn
+to itself the notice of the world as the loveliness of Kentucky. It was
+on the southern boundary of this plateau, living in a pioneer hamlet and
+practising far and wide through a wilderness, that a country doctor
+became the father of ovarian surgery in the United States and won the
+reverence of the world of science and the gratitude of humanity. In
+another pioneer settlement one of the greatest of American lithotomists
+spread the lustre of his name and the goodness of his deeds over the
+whole country west of the Alleghany Mountains; and these were but two of
+those many country doctors who there for well-nigh a century were the
+reliance of their people: physicians, surgeons, diagnosticians, nurses,
+pharmacists, friends--all in one.
+
+This powerful and brilliant tradition had descended to Dr. Birney, and
+he had worthily upheld it. In some respects he had solidly advanced it,
+notably in his treatment of children's diseases.
+
+A second room, in which the articles of his personal life were kept,
+gave further knowledge of him as a man. Outside the windows there was a
+tennis court; he played tennis with his children and with young people
+of the neighborhood. You saw his racquet on the wall; and if you had
+opened a closet, you would have found the flannels and the shoes.
+Elsewhere on the wall you saw his reel. In season he liked to fish, when
+his patients also could go fishing, or at least were well enough to feel
+like going; and in the same closet you might have noted the residue of a
+fisherman's outfit. He fished not only for black bass, but for that mild
+pond and creek fish prized as a delicacy on Kentucky tables--a variety
+of the calico bass known in the local vocabulary as "newlight."
+
+Still elsewhere you saw his game bag and bird gun--he liked to call it
+by the older word, fowling-piece. He hunted: quail, doves, wild duck. In
+another closet you would have been interested to discover his regalia as
+a member of the Order of Masons; and well placed beside it his uniform
+as a member of the State Guard--the two well placed there. When years
+before his neighbors had enrolled him in the Guard, they had saluted him
+as one more Kentucky Colonel. "I will submit to no official
+degradation," he had said; "I am already the Commander of the whole army
+of you on the field of your human Waterloo: salute your General!"
+
+His library added its testimony as to other humanities. Scattered about
+on tables and mantel-piece were fine old pipes and boxes of cigars and
+playing-cards. There were poker chips, showing that the doctor had poker
+neighbors (where else if not there?), though whist was his game. You
+realized that he was a man at home among a people who loved play--must
+have play. On his sideboard were temperate decanters: he had sideboard
+neighbors. Altogether a human-looking room for much that is human; easy
+to enter, comfortable to stay in, hard to quit.
+
+But our closest friends can come so close to us and no closer; they
+surround us but none of them enters us. Nature forbids that any but our
+own feet should cross the bridge spanning the distance between other
+people and the fortress of the individual. Across that bridge we can
+take with us no companions except those that keep silent amid its
+silences; that can speak to us but that cannot see us: those great
+voices without eyes; those great listeners without ears; great
+counsellors without criticism; great hands that guide and refuse to
+smite; great judges that embody law and refuse to sit in judgment on
+us--Books.
+
+Some of the doctor's books held for him life's indispensable laughter;
+and no one of us ever tells all the things in this world that we laugh
+at. Some held for him life's tears; and no one of us ever tells the
+things that secretly start our own. Some held neither laughter nor tears
+but what is above both--life's calm; and what one of us but at times
+feels the need to ascend to some inner mountain-top of our own
+spirits--far above the whole darkened or radiant cloud-rack of
+emotion--and look futureward into the promised peace, the end of our
+wandering. Joys--sorrows--and calm: these three for him, too.
+
+Such books stayed with the doctor year after year. He could wake in the
+night and find them through the darkness; in the darkness they knew how
+to find him. They were not part of his medical library, of course, which
+was another matter. But they filled three sides of a large low revolving
+bookcase in the middle of the room beside his easy chair and his lamp
+and table.
+
+The fourth side of his bookcase held the books that came and went as a
+stream, entering and passing on: he drank from them as they flowed by.
+Always they were books of fiction or biography which held in solution
+the truth of the human matter about some life that had fought or was
+fighting its path through to victory. Always he would have books of
+victory. By preference it must be a story real or imagined of some boy,
+youth, young man, middle-aged man, who was in the struggle for existence
+and who was on the side of survival. He kept in mind the words of a
+great Frenchman that the way to make an impression upon the world is to
+plough through humanity like a cannon-ball or to creep through it like a
+pestilence. But he knew that in this world there are very few human
+cannonballs, though of such pestilence there is always more than enough.
+Rather every common man's life, and every uncommon man's life, is a
+drawn sword that has to cut its way through all other drawn swords. Here
+were the books which disclosed the mettle of a character: the last
+magnificent refusal to be ruined by evil which is the very breath of a
+man and the slow measure of the world's advance. So that, while much is
+always failing in everybody, all is never failing. Out of the blackest
+abyss there arises in the wounded and prostrate some white peak of
+unmelting innocence--at the base of which Life's battle rages.
+
+Many a time long after midnight he would read to a finish some such
+triumphant story; and with a murmur of "Well done!" he would close the
+book, turn out his lamp, and go to sleep in his chair with his clothes
+on--with that scene of victory emptying its echoes into his ear and his
+dreams.
+
+Here, then, was some discrete knowledge of the doctor as a doctor and as
+a man. But there was one thing in his library that blended these two
+separate aspects, showing how the man felt as a physician and how the
+physician felt as a man. This was a series of pictures running around
+the walls and connecting great epochs in the progress of Medicine.
+
+He had a liking, as the world has, for some brief series of climaxes
+that will depict a subject at a glance. Very memorable to him was
+Shakespeare's Seven Ages--because they were seven and were thus easily
+grasped by poetry and reason. But he knew that Shakespeare might as
+truly have substituted another seven--with as good poetry and reason; or
+he might have made the ages fourteen or forty-nine or forty-nine
+hundred; for actually the ages of a man's life are infinite; but being
+reduced to seven, we all recognize them.
+
+And memorable to him likewise had been Hogarth's _Progress of the Rake_
+with its few pictures; and his _Progress of the Harlot_ with its few;
+and his _Progress of Marriage à la Mode_ with its few; and the _Progress
+of Cruelty_ with its fewest of all--only four, but more than enough! And
+yet the stages in the progress of the rake and of the harlot and of
+marriage à la mode and of cruelty are infinite; and at no single stage
+in the progress of any one of them could you actually find either Rake
+or Harlot or Infidelity or Cruelty. Being portrayed as few, the world
+understands and finds its own account in them.
+
+So around the walls of his library there hung a series of pictures
+showing the progress of Medicine across the ages.
+
+The first picture represented a scene in the life of primitive man,
+during the period when he had long enough been man to form into hostile
+tribes, but not long enough to have advanced far from the boundaries of
+the brute. It is a battle picture: the battle is over: the survivors are
+gone: the dead and wounded lie about. Medicine as a human science has
+not yet been born; surgery has not yet separated itself from the
+movements of instinct. Yet there was activity among the wounded. In some
+of the warriors you saw such attempts in the care of their wounds as one
+may witness to-day in wounded birds and animals--if one is fortunate
+enough to be so placed as to be able to watch: there were the
+instinctive devices to cleanse, to protect, to alleviate: those low
+beginnings of the great science which you may observe to-day in your dog
+when he has come home after a fight with lacerated ears and slashed
+thighs--when he crawls under the porch to the darkest corner to keep
+away other dogs and light and flies; whose sole instrument of cleansing
+is his tongue and whose only bathing fluid is saliva. On that
+battle-field you saw such beginnings of surgery as to-day is practised
+by a bird treating its broken wing or broken leg. Thus the wounded
+warriors concerned themselves with their hurts--all mother-naked. Along
+one edge of the battle-field was a stream of running water; some had
+started to draw themselves toward this and had died on the way. One was
+stretched full alongside--a young chief of magnificent proportions and a
+face of higher intelligence. And out of that intelligence, as a
+marvellous advance in the development of man, you saw one action: he was
+dipping up water in the palm of his hand and pouring it upon his wound.
+At some moment in the history of the race there must somewhere have been
+that first movement of the developing animal to substitute water for
+saliva. That great historic moment was depicted there. It was still the
+Azoic Age of Medicine.
+
+Near by hung a second picture. Ages have passed, no one knows how many.
+The brute has become Prometheus; he has learned the use of fire; and he
+has learned the most heroic application of flame--to touch it to himself
+where he is in greatest agony: that is, he has learned to cauterize his
+wounds. More than fire can he now handle; he has learned to bring
+together fat and flame; and he has discovered how from flame to produce
+oil; and he has learned to pour boiling oil into the holes in his body
+made by the implements of war. It is the long Ages of Medicine for the
+cautery and burning oil.
+
+A third picture hung next. More ages have passed, no one knows how many;
+and the scene is another battle-field far down toward modern times. It
+is France; it is the second half of the sixteenth century; it is warfare
+in Piedmont. Troops are sweeping up the hill, and in the background is a
+walled city with turrets and towers; and in the foreground wounded
+soldiers are arriving or are lying about on the ground. There is a rude
+mass of masonry used as an operating-table; and on the operating-table
+is a soldier, one of whose legs has just been amputated above the knee;
+an attendant holds the saw with which the leg has just been sawed off,
+and the stump of it has dropped below. Beside the wounded man stand two
+figures: one the figure of the past; and the other a figure of the
+future--a poor barber's apprentice, father of modern surgery, named to
+be massacred on St. Bartholomew's eve, but spared because none but a
+despised Huguenot could be found in all France skilful enough to
+safeguard the royal orthodox blood. There beside the soldier they stand,
+these two, and in them ages meet; for the figure of the past holds in
+his hand one of the cauteries that are kept redhot in a brazier near his
+feet; and the other holds in his a new thing in the world--a simple
+ligature. A great scene, a great epoch: the beginning of new surgery
+when the flowing of blood from amputations of the great arteries could
+be stopped by a mere bandage: that man--Ambroise Paré!
+
+More centuries have passed--we know exactly how many now from year to
+year. It is the nineteenth, and it is the New World; the next picture on
+the library wall portrayed a scene on the Western frontier of a new
+civilization. It is the backwoods of Kentucky, it is a pioneer
+settlement of three or four hundred souls, nearly a thousand miles from
+any hospital or dissecting-room. In the front door of his rude pioneer
+house stands a Kentucky country doctor, Ephraim MacDowell. His patient
+is before him, a woman on horseback in a side-saddle. She has just
+arrived, having ridden some seventy miles through the wilderness. He is
+assisting her to alight; and he is soon to perform, without
+consultation, without precedent in the ages of surgery (but not without
+a prayer for himself and her), by strength of his own will and nerve and
+by the light of the solitary candle of his own genius, an operation
+which made Kentucky the mother of ovarian surgery for all coming time, a
+new epoch of life and mercy: he going his own way to immortality as
+Shakespeare went his, as the greatest always go theirs--by a new path
+untrumpeted and alone.
+
+Another picture represented a scene in Boston in 1846, less than half a
+century later; for the lonely mountain peaks of progress stretching
+across the ages are beginning to crowd each other now; they are
+beginning to run together into a range of continuous discovery. That
+picture also shows an operating-room; and there stood the American
+Morton, making for the world the first merciful use of anæsthetics: with
+which the silence of painlessness fell upon humanity's old outcry of
+torture under treatment.
+
+There the doctor's pictures ended. In our own time he might have added
+one more for the epoch of the Roentgen Ray and another for the Finsen
+Light; and another for transfusion of blood; and still others crowning
+other mountain-tops in the new Surgery and new Medicine.
+
+Thus he had before his eyes in his library some few Ages of his
+Science--as it went forward and slipped back and missed the road and
+forgot the road, yet somehow steadily advanced across the centuries like
+an erring unconquerable man across his years. Not progressing however as
+a man grows, from infancy to decrepitude; but moving from its old age
+toward its youth, always toward its youth, as Swedenborg's Angels fly
+forever toward their Spring. It ran around his walls like a great
+roadway, connecting the last discoveries of his Science with the surgery
+of the wolf who gnaws off his imprisoned leg and with the medicine of
+the sick dog that eats grass.
+
+He called it his World's Path of Lessening Pain.
+
+It was the last refuge and solace of his often tired and often wounded
+mind. Even after friends were gone at night and the poker chips were
+stacked or the whist counters folded; after the sideboard had been
+visited and temperately forsaken; after the abiding books had done for
+him what they could; in the still house far into the night, he would
+sometimes lie back in his chair and survey those battle-pictures of a
+science on which he was spending his loyalty and his strength.
+
+Once, in younger days, outside the Eternal City, he had gone to study
+those fragments of the Old Roman Aqueduct that to-day are slowly
+crumbling on the Campagna; and standing alone before it he had in
+imagination searched for the figure of some young workman who had helped
+to mould those brick or to finish those columns: the figure of some
+obscure vanished peasant. So the great wall of his science, being built
+onward across the centuries into the future, would be revisited by men
+of the future in places where it stood in ruins. He would be as one
+whose life with its mistakes was yet linked to indestructible good. He
+would vanish from beside the wall himself, but his work upon it would
+have helped to uphold humanity. And many a night he went asleep in his
+chair, committing himself to his Science, as the forgotten Roman laborer
+of old may have fallen asleep under his own arch.
+
+But, in that same Italy, northward are the Apennines; and sometimes in
+travelling through these or through the Swiss glaciers where Nature
+measures all things on the scale of the sublime--sometimes as your eye
+is passing from snow peak to snow peak, suddenly away up on some
+mountain-side you will see a human hut; and standing in the door of that
+hut a single human being; and the thought may come to you that there, in
+the heart of that pygmy, may dwell sorrow that dwarfs the Alps.
+
+The doctor's library had such a picture: it completed the story of the
+room, and it effaced everything else in it. In a somewhat darkened
+corner hung a framed photograph of his wife in her bridal dress made not
+long after their wedding. Once his photograph had hung beside it. The
+plaster where the nail had been driven in had either fallen out or it
+had been torn out. He never knew--he knew enough not to ask.
+
+As for the photograph, there stood a young bride, looking into her
+future and trying to conceal from herself what she saw soon awaiting
+her: the life of a woman wedded but not loved. And there was
+recollection in the eyes too: that the man who had married her perhaps
+in the very breath of his wooing had wished she were another; that at
+the altar he had perhaps wished he were putting his ring upon another's
+hand; and that if there were to be children, he would always be wishing
+for them another mother.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+The doctor sat there that morning trying to work at the books of the
+year. The rooms were comfortable; the children were away at the fireside
+of another man's wife; the servants did not dare disturb him; his horses
+waited in their stalls; it was the day on which he could begin to reap
+his golden harvest--a pleasant day for most men; but he could not see
+the blanks before him nor remember the names he filled in nor the
+figures that were for value received.
+
+Because there lay open before him the Book of the Years.
+
+And coming down toward him on the track of memory through this book was
+his life from boyhood to middle age: first the playing feet of the child
+that have no path as yet; then the straight path of the boy; then the
+winding road of youth; then the quickly widened road, so smooth, so
+easy, of a young man; and then the fixed deepening rut of middle age.
+
+And now the rut of middle age had come to its forks: north fork and
+south fork; or east fork and west fork--he must choose.
+
+Whoso cares to know where and how the doctor's life-path started and
+across what kind of country it had run until now, a middle-aged man, he
+sat there this day at the tragedy of its forking, may if he so choose
+follow the road by the chart of a narrative.
+
+But let him remember that this narrative goes back into a society unlike
+that of to-day and into a Kentucky that has vanished. Back there are
+other manners, other customs, other types of men: a different light on
+the world altogether.
+
+
+
+
+                                   IV
+
+                         THE BOOK OF THE YEARS
+
+
+MORE than half a century ago, or during the decade of 1850 and 1860,
+when American life on the fertile plain of Kentucky attained its ripest
+flavor, there was living with great ease to himself and others on a
+large estate in one of the bluegrass counties a country gentleman and
+farmer who was nothing more: nothing more because that was enough. Being
+farmer took up much of his time, and being a gentleman took up the rest.
+
+He one day observed that his prolific heels were beginning to be trodden
+upon by a group of stalwart sons nearing manhood; or, in the idiom of
+that picturesque soil, all thickly bunched in their race for the grand
+stand. According to the robust family life of that era and people, a
+year or less was often the interval between births; and a father,
+slanting his eyes upward to his oldest who had just reached twenty-one,
+might catch a glimpse of a fourth son smiling loyally at him from the
+top of the rank stalk of eighteen.
+
+This juvenescent and prodigal sire clearly foreseeing, as many of his
+neighbors foresaw, the emancipation of the negroes and the downfall of
+the Southern feudal system and thus the downfall of the Kentucky
+gentleman of the feudal soil, could see no further. When those grapes
+then ripening went into the winepress of destiny, there would be no more
+like them: the stock would be cut down, a new vineyard would have to be
+planted; and what might become of his sons as laborers in that vineyard
+he knew not, though looking wistfully forth. Therefore he determined to
+store them away for their own safeguard among those ancestral
+professions alike of the Old and New World that are exempt from
+political vicissitude and dynastic changes.
+
+Now it happened that among his friends he counted the great Dr. Benjamin
+Dudley, the illustrious Kentucky lithotomist at Lexington; and taking
+counsel of that learned and kindly man, he chose for his first-born
+stalwart--since the stalwart when invited to do so declined to choose it
+for himself--the profession of medicine; and having politely packed his
+trunk, he politely packed him with a polite body servant and a polite
+good-by off to a medical school, the best the Southern States then
+boasted--and the Southern States knew how to boast in those days.
+
+But the colt that has been dragged to the water cannot be forced to
+drink; and the semi-docile son could not be made to introduce into his
+system his father's professional prescription. His presence at the
+medical school was evidence in its way that he had swallowed the
+prescription; but his conduct as a student showed that by his own will
+he had inhibited its action upon his vital parts.
+
+In the year of finishing his course of lectures his father died; and
+upon returning home certificated as a doctor, he returned also as a
+young blood of independent fortune, independent future, and independent
+Feelings--the last of which, the Feelings, he regarded as by far the
+most important of the three. At the bottom of his trunk against the
+lining was his diploma, on the principle that we pack first what we
+shall need last.
+
+The immediate use this golden youth made of his liberty and his
+Feelings was to take over into his control a share of the ancestral
+estate that fell to him under our American laws of partible
+inheritance; to build on it a low rambling manor house; and into this
+to convey his portion of the polished family silver and the polished
+family blacks. Soon afterward with no exertion on his part he married
+him a wife in the neighborhood; tore up his diploma as if to
+annihilate in his establishment the very recognition of disease; laid
+off a training-track; and proceeded to employ his languid energies in
+a fashion which his father had not favored for any of his sons--the
+breeding of Kentucky thoroughbreds.
+
+Years passed. History came and went its thundering way, leaving the
+nation like a forest blasted with lightning and drenched with rain. The
+Kentucky gentleman of the feudal sort was gone, having disappeared in
+the clouds of that history which had swept him from the landscape.
+
+The mild young Kentucky breeder mellowed to his middle years, winning
+and losing on the road as we all must, but with never a word about it
+one way or the other from him; early losing his wife and winning the
+makeshifts of widowerhood, entering so to speak upon its restrictions;
+losing his little daughter and winning a nephew whom he adopted and
+idolized; letting him run wild over the house, and then about the yard,
+and then about the farm, and then across boundary fences into other
+farms, and then into the towns, and then out into the world.
+
+There were parts of his farm that looked like English downs; and on
+these fed Southdown sheep; for the Kentucky country gentleman of that
+period killed his own mutton. (He killed pretty much his own everything,
+even his own neighbors.) No saddle of mutton out of a public market
+house for him and for his groaning mahogany. And so it seemed well-nigh
+a romantic coincidence that the fatherless, motherless boy who came to
+play on these downs should have arrived there with the name of Downs
+Birney.
+
+The Kentucky turfman, with his Southdown sheep and Durham cattle and
+White Berkshire hogs and thoroughbred horses and Blue-dorking chickens,
+was born, as may already have been observed, with that Southern
+indolence which occasionally equals the Oriental's; and as more time
+passed he settled into the deeper imperturbability of men who commit
+their destiny to fast horses. Apparently they early become so inoculated
+with hazard as to end in being immune to all excitement. As he could
+stroll over his farm without having to climb a hill, he had perhaps
+preferred to build him a low manor house so that he could lounge over it
+without having to take the trouble to go upstairs. In the chosen
+business of his life it would appear that he had wished to avail himself
+of a principle of Old Roman law: that he who does a thing through
+another does it himself; and thus he could sit perfectly still on his
+veranda with two legs and run nearly a mile a minute on a track with
+four.
+
+A rural Kentucky gentleman of dead-ripe local pre-bellum flavor:
+exhaling a kind of Falernian bouquet as he dwelt under the serene blue
+sky on a beautiful bluegrass Sabine farm: a warm-visaged, soft-handed,
+bland-voiced man--so bland that when he strolled up to you and accosted
+you, you were uncertain whether he was going to offer to bet with you or
+to baptize you. Season after season this tranquil happy Kentuckian dwelt
+there, intent upon making nothing of himself and upon making the horse
+an adequate citizen of a state that likes to go its own gait--and to
+make him a leading citizen of the world: measurably he succeeded in
+doing both.
+
+As he receded from view, his horses advanced into notice. He was
+probably never better satisfied with his stable lot and with his human
+lot than when at one of his annual sales he could hear the
+auctioneer--that high-gingered Pindar of the black walnut stump--arouse
+the enthusiasm of the buyers by announcing that a certain three-year-old
+had as its sire the _Immortal Cunctator_ and that its dam was the
+peerless _Swift Perdition_. Year after year he dwelt there, contented in
+drinking the limestone water of his hillside spring with his foals and
+his fillies; drinking at his table the unskimmed milk of his Durham
+dairy; and drinking indoors and outdoors the waterproof beverage of a
+four-seasons philosophic decanter. The decanter resembled the limestone
+spring in this at least: that it could never rise higher than being full
+and could never be baled dry.
+
+In the vernal season, as sole proprietor of all this teeming rural
+bliss, he sat on the top rail of a fence and witnessed the manufacture
+of the hippic generations; in summer sat on the top rail of another
+fence and saw his colts trained; in autumn in the judges' stand sat with
+a finger on his watch and saw them win; in winter, passing into a state
+of partial hibernation over the study of pedigrees, his fingers plunged
+deep in his beard, with comfortable mumblings and fumblings that bore
+their analogy to a bear's brumal licking of its paws.
+
+A veritable Roman poet Horace of a man, with yearlings as his odes--and
+with a few mules for satires.
+
+Surely possessed of some excellent Epicurean philosophy of his own in
+that he could live so long in a wretched world and escape all
+wretchedness. If storms broke over his head, he insisted that the
+weather just then was especially fine; if trouble knocked at the door,
+he announced with regret from the inside that the door was locked. Is
+there any wonder that, nobody though he insisted upon being, his
+appearance in public always attracted a crowd? For the inhabitants of
+this world are always looking for one happy inhabitant. His
+acquaintances hurried to him as they would break into a playful run for
+a barrel of lemonade at a woodland picnic when they needed to be cooled;
+or as they waited around a kettle of burgroo at a barbecue in autumn
+when they wished to be warmed. Hot or cold, they felt their need to be
+sprayed as to their unquiet passions by his streaming benevolence.
+
+Always that benevolence. On two distinct occasions he had placidly
+reduced by one the entire meritorious population of central Kentucky;
+and then with a clear countenance, had presented himself at the bar of
+justice to be cleared. Upon his technical acquittal, the judge had
+casually said that no matter how guilty he was, it would have been a
+much fouler crime to hang a citizen with so innocent an expression; that
+the habitual look of innocence was of more value in a homicidal
+community than a verdict of guilty for two fits of distemper!
+
+If the world should last until Kentucky passes out of history into the
+classic and the mythological; if Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road
+should become Orion and the Milky Way; if the capture of Betsy Calloway
+should become the rape of Lucrece; if the two gigantic Indian fighters,
+the Poe brothers, should establish their claim to the authorship of
+those Poems and Tales which even in our own time are beginning to fall
+away from a mythical personage,--hardly more than an emanation of
+darkness, perhaps this unique Kentucky gentleman who insisted upon being
+no one at all will exhibit his beaming face in the heavens of those ages
+as Charioteer to the Horses of the Sun.
+
+The sole warrant for here disturbing his light repose under his
+patchwork of turf is that he had taken to his hearthstone and heart an
+orphan nephew, whose destiny it was to be profoundly influenced by the
+environment of heart and hearthstone: by this breeding of horses, by the
+method of training them; by that serene outlook upon the world and that
+gayety of nature which attracted happiness to it as naturally as the
+martin box in the yard drew the martins. Possibly even more influenced
+in the earlier years around that fireside where there was no women, no
+mother, no father, either; nor parent out of doors save the motherhood
+of the near earth and the fatherhood of the distant sky.
+
+From the day when he arrived on that stock farm its influences began
+their work upon him and kept it up during years when he was not aware.
+But in his own memory the first event in the long series of events--the
+first scene of all the scenes that made his Progress--occurred when he
+was about fifteen years old. As the middle-aged man, sitting in his
+library that morning with the Book of the Years before him, reviewed his
+life, his memory went straight back to that event and stopped there as
+though it were the beginning. Of course it was not the beginning; of
+course he could not himself have known where the beginning was or what
+it was; but he did what we all do as we look back toward childhood and
+try to open a road as far as memory will reach,--we begin somewhere, and
+the doctor began with his fifteenth year--as the first scene of his
+Progress. But let that scene be painted not as the doctor saw it: more
+nearly as it was: he was too young to know all that it contained.
+
+It was a balmy Saturday afternoon of early summer; and uncle and nephew
+were out in the yard of the white and lemon-colored manor house,
+enjoying the shade of some blossoming locust trees. The uncle was
+sitting in a yellow cane-bottom chair; and he had on a yellow nankeen
+waistcoat and trousers; so that the chair looked like an overgrown
+architectural harmony attached to his dorsal raiment; and he had on a
+pleated bosom shirt which had been polished by his negro laundress with
+iron and paraffine until it looked like a cake of winter ice marked off
+to be cut in slices. In the top button-hole was a cluster diamond pin
+which represented almost a star-system; and about his throat was tied a
+magenta cravat: that was the day for solferinos and magentas and Madeira
+wine. But the neck of the wearer of the cravat was itself turning to a
+gouty magenta; so that the ribbon, while appropriately selected, was as
+a color-sign superfluous. On the grass beside him lay his black alpaca
+coat and panama hat and gold-headed cane and red silk handkerchief and a
+piece of dry wood admirable for whittling.
+
+He had been to a colt show that morning several miles across the country
+in a neighborhood where there was some turbulence; not the turbulence of
+the colts; and he had reached home just before dinner--glad to get there
+without turbulence; and the dinner had been good, and now he was
+experiencing that comfortable expansion of girth which turns even a
+pessimist toward optimism; that streaming benevolence of his countenance
+never streamed to better advantage.
+
+He was reading his Saturday weekly newspaper, an entire page of which
+showed that this was a great thoroughbred breeding-region of the world.
+At the distance of several yards you could have inferred as much by the
+character of the advertisements, each of which was headed by the little
+black wood-cut of a stallion. The page was blackened by this wood-cut as
+it repeated itself up and down, column after column. Whether the
+stallion were sorrel or roan or bay or chestnut or black--one wood-cut
+stood for all. There was one other wood-cut for jacks--all jacks.
+
+In the same way one little wood-cut in an earlier generation had been
+used to stand for runaway slaves: a negro with a stick swung across his
+shoulder and with a bundle dangling from the stick down his fugitive
+back; one wood-cut for all slaves. If you saw between the legs of the
+figure, it was a man; if you did not--it was the other figure of man's
+fate in slavery.
+
+The turfman read every item of his newspaper, having first with a due
+sense of proportion cast his eye on the advertisement of his own stud.
+
+The nephew was lying on the grass near by, wearing a kind of
+dove-colored suit; so that from a distance he might have been taken for
+a huge mound of vegetable mould; he having just awakened from a nap: a
+heavy, rank, insolent, human cub with his powers half pent up and half
+unfolded, except a fully developed insolence toward all things and
+people except his uncle, himself, and his friend, Fred Ousley. He rolled
+drowsily about on the soft turf, waiting to take his turn at the
+newspaper: it was the only thing he read: otherwise he was too busy
+reading the things of life on the farm. Once he stretched himself on his
+back, looking upward for anything and everything in sight. The light
+breeze swung the boughs of the locust, now heavily draped with blossoms;
+and soon his eyes began to follow what looked like a flame darting in
+and out amid the snowy cascades of bloom--a flame that was vocal and
+that dropped down upon his ear crimson petals of song--the Baltimore
+oriole.
+
+He liked all birds but three; and presently one of those that he
+disliked appeared in a fork of a locust and darted at the oriole,
+driving it away and then returning to the fork--the blue-jay. His hatred
+of this bird dated from the time when one of the negroes had told him
+that no blue-jays could be seen at twelve o'clock on Friday--all having
+gone to carry brimstone to the lower regions. After that he and Fred
+Ousley had made a point of trying to kill jays early Friday morning: a
+fatally shied stone would cut off to a dead certainty just so much of
+that supply of brimstone. He hated them even more on Saturday, when he
+thought of them as having returned. The one in the fork now was looking
+down at him, and, with a great mockery of bowing, called out his
+_Fiddle-Fiddle-Fiddle_: it was his way of saying: "You'll get there: and
+there will be brimstone, sonny!"
+
+Of course he believed none of this legend; but suggestions live on in
+the mind even though they do not root themselves in faith; and memory
+also has its power to make us like and dislike. Presently, as he lay
+there stretched on the grass and near the edge of the shade, another
+ill-omened bird came sailing cloud-high across the blue firmament; and
+having taken notice of him,--a motionless form on the earth below,--it
+turned back and began to circle about him. That was another bird he
+hated. When a child he asked about it, and had been told that it removed
+all disagreeable things from the farms. He thought it a very kind, very
+self-sacrificing and industrious bird to do so. And he conceived the
+whole species of them as a procession of wheelbarrows operated across
+the sky by means of wings and tails. Afterwards, when his views grew
+less hazy on natural history, he lowered his opinion of the
+disinterested buzzard.
+
+The third bird on which had fallen his resentment was the rain-crow:
+earlier in his childhood it had been told him that when the clacking
+wail of this songster was heard on the stillness of a summer day, a
+storm was coming. And he had seen storms enough on that very
+farm--tornadoes that cut a path through the woods as a reaper cuts his
+way across the wheat-field. But he saw no rain-crow to-day; you look for
+them in August when they haunt the cool shade-trees of lawns.
+
+Altogether these three birds made with one another a rather formidable
+combination for a boy living on a farm: the one brought on storms that
+threatened life; the second gladly presided at your obsequies, if the
+opportunity were given; and the third was pleased to accompany you to
+the infernal regions with the necessary fuel. The arrangement seemed
+about perfect; apparently they had overlooked nothing of value.
+
+Thus he had not escaped that vast romance of Nature which brooded more
+thickly over Kentucky country life in those days than now: a romance of
+superstitions and legends about bird life and animal life and tree life,
+that extended even to Nature's chemicals; for was there not brimstone
+with its story? As far back as he could remember he had been made
+familiar with the idea--rather terrible in its way--that there was a
+variety of Biblical horse which breathed brimstone. All alone one day he
+had made a somewhat cautious personal examination of the paddocks and
+stalls; and was relieved to discover that his uncle's horses breathed
+out only what they breathed in--Kentucky air. He felt glad that they
+were not of the breed of those Biblical chargers.
+
+But then there was brimstone in reserve for a large portion of the human
+family; and with a perverse mocking deviltry he pushed his inquiry in
+this direction still farther. Without the knowledge of any one he had
+wasted at a drugstore in town his brightest dime for a package of the
+avenging substance; and at home the following day he had scraped chips
+together at the woodpile and started a blaze and poured the brimstone
+in. Actually he had a sample of hell fire in operation there behind the
+woodpile! There was no question that brimstone knew how to burn: it
+seemed well adapted for its purpose. He did not take Fred Ousley into
+his confidence in this experiment: the possibilities were a little too
+personal even for friendship!
+
+All this reveals a trait in him which lay deeper than child's-play--a
+susceptibility to suggestion. Even while he amused himself as a child
+with the shams and superstitions about nature, these lived on in his
+mind as part of its furnishings. Alas, that this should be true for all
+of us--that we cannot forget the things we do not believe in. To the end
+of our lives our thoughts have to move amid the obstructions and rubbish
+of the useless and the laughable. The salon of our inner dwelling is
+largely filled with old furniture which we decline to sit in, but are
+obliged to look at, and are powerless to remove; and which fills the
+favorite recesses where we should like to arrange the new.
+
+There they were, then, that Saturday afternoon: the uncle with his
+newspaper and the nephew at that moment with his group of evil birds.
+
+There was an interruption. Around the yard with its velvet turf and
+blooming shrubs and vines and flowers, that filled the air with
+fragrance, was a plank fence newly whitewashed. All the fences of the
+farm had been newly whitewashed; and they ran hither and thither across
+the emerald of the landscape like structures of white marble. Through
+the gate of the yard fence which was heard to shut behind him there now
+advanced toward uncle and nephew a neighbor of theirs, the minister of
+the country church, himself a bluegrass farmer. He was one of the many
+who liked to seek the company of the untroubled turfman. The two were
+good neighbors and great friends. The minister came oftenest for a visit
+on Saturday afternoons, as if he wished to touch at this harbor of a
+quiet life while passing from the earthly fields of the week to the
+Sabbath's holy land.
+
+At the sound of the latch the uncle lifted his eyes from his newspaper.
+
+"Bring a chair, Downs, will you?" he said in a cordial undertone; and
+soon there was a fine group of rural humanity under the blossoming
+locusts: the two men talking, and the boy, now that his turn had come at
+last, lying on the grass absorbed in the newspaper.
+
+The men were characters of broad plain speech, much like English squires
+of two centuries earlier: not ladylike men: Chaucer might have been
+pleased to make one of their group and listen, and turn them afterwards
+into fine old English tales; Hogarth might have craved the privilege to
+sit near and observe and paint; and a certain Sir John Falstaff might
+have been at home with them--in the absence of the "Merry Wives."
+
+There was another interruption. Around the corner of the manor house a
+young servant advanced, bearing a waiter with two deep glasses well
+filled: at the bottom the drink was golden; it was green and snow-white
+at the top: a little view of icebergs with pine trees growing on them.
+
+The servant smiled and approached with embarrassment, having discovered
+a guest; and in a lowered tone she offered to the master of the house
+apologies for not bringing three.
+
+"This is yours, Aleck," said the host, holding out one glass to the
+minister. "This is for you, Downs. Now, Melissa, make me one, will you?"
+
+"None for me," said the minister.
+
+"Then never mind, Melissa. But wait--lemonade?"
+
+"Yes; lemonade. It is the very thing."
+
+"As it is or as it might be?"
+
+"As it is."
+
+"Lemonade without the decanter, Melissa."
+
+While the servant was in the house, the uncle and the nephew waited with
+their glasses untouched.
+
+The turfman was very happy--happy in his guest, in his nephew, in
+himself, in everything: his mind overflowed with his quaint playfulness;
+and when he talked, you were loath to interrupt him.
+
+"Aleck," he said, rattling the ice in his julep, "don't you suppose that
+when we get to heaven, nothing will make us happier there than
+remembering the good times we had in this world? so if you want to be
+happy there, be happy here. _This_ is one of the pleasures that I expect
+to carry in memory if I am ever transformed into a male seraph. But I
+may not have to remember. If there is any provision made for the thirst
+of the Kentucky redeemed, do you know what I think will be the reward of
+all central Kentucky male angels? From under the great white throne
+there will trickle an ice-cold stream of this, ready-made--and I
+shouldn't wonder if there were a Kentuckian under the throne making it.
+The Kentucky delegation would be camped somewhere near, though there
+will be two delegations, of course, because they will divide on
+politics. And don't you fear that there will not be others hastening to
+the banks of that stream! It is too late to look for young Moses in the
+bulrushes; but I shouldn't wonder if the whole ransomed universe
+discovered old Moses in the mint."
+
+"_Which mint?_" said the minister, who kept his worldly wits about him.
+
+"Aleck," replied the turfman, "I leave it to you whether that is not too
+flippant a remark with which to close a gentleman's solemn discourse."
+
+The lemonade was served.
+
+"Is yours sour enough, Aleck?"
+
+The visitor found it to his taste.
+
+"Is yours sweet enough, Downs?"
+
+This hurt Downs' feelings: it implied that he was not old enough to like
+things sour. He replied surlily that his might have been stronger.
+
+The servant, watching from inside a window, judged by the angle at which
+the glasses were tilted that they were empty: she returned and asked
+whether she should bring 'one more all around.'
+
+"More lemonade, Aleck?"
+
+"Thank you, no more for me--but it was good, better than yours."
+
+"Another for you, Downs?"
+
+Downs thought that he would not have another just for the moment: the
+servant disappeared.
+
+The nephew returned to his paper. The turfman took from the turf a piece
+of whittling wood, split it, and handed the larger piece to the
+minister. The minister produced his penknife and began to whittle. In
+those days a countryman who did not carry his penknife with a big blade
+well sharpened for whittling as he talked with his neighbor stood
+outside the manners and customs of a simple cheerful land. And now the
+two friends were ready to enjoy their afternoon--the vicar of souls and
+the vicar of the stables.
+
+The minister began to speak of his troubles--with that strange leaning
+we all have to let our confidences fall upon people who are not too
+good: the vicar of the stables was not too good to be sympathetic. It
+was all summed up in one sentence--discouragement about his growing
+boys. From the beginnings of their lives he had tried to teach them the
+things they were not to do; and all their lives they had seemed bent on
+doing those things. He felt disheartened as the boys grew older and
+their waywardness increased. _What not to do_--morning and night _what
+not to do_. Yet they were always doing it.
+
+Out under the trees the peaceful happy sounds of summer life in the yard
+came to the ears of the minister as nature's chorus of happiness and
+indifference. The breeder of thoroughbreds, as his friend grew silent,
+laughed with his peaceful nature, and remarked with respect and
+gentleness:--
+
+"I never train my colts in that way."
+
+"My sons are not colts," said the minister, laughing. "Nor young
+jackasses!"
+
+"Yes, I know they are not colts; but I doubt whether their difference
+makes any difference in the training of the two species of animal."
+
+After a pause which was filled with little sounds made by the
+industrious penknives, the master of the stables went into the matter
+for the pleasure of it:--
+
+"You tell me that you have tried a method of training and that it is a
+failure. I don't wonder: any training would be a failure that made it
+the chief business in life of any creature--human or brute--to fix its
+mind upon what it is _not_ to do. You say you are always warning your
+boys; that you fill their minds with cautions; that you arouse their
+imagination with pictures of forbidden things; make them look at life as
+a check, a halter, a blind bridle. So far as I can discover, you have
+prepared a list of the evil traits of humanity and required your boys to
+memorize these: and then you tell them to beware. Is that it?"
+
+"That is exactly it."
+
+The youth lying on the grass laid aside his newspaper and began to
+listen. The two men welcomed his attention. The minister always found it
+difficult to speak without a congregation--part of which must be
+sinners: here was an occasion for outdoor preaching. The turfman
+probably welcomed this chance to get before the youth in an indirect way
+certain suggestions which he relied upon for his:--
+
+"Well, that is where your training and my training differ," he resumed.
+"I never assemble my colts at the barn door--that is, I would not if I
+could--and recite to them the vicious traits of the wild horse and
+require them to memorize those traits and think about them unceasingly,
+but never to imitate them. Speaking of jacks, Aleck, you know our
+neighbor stands a jack. And he would not if he could compel his jack to
+make a study of the peculiarities of Balaam's ass. But you compel your
+boys to make a study of Balaam and his tribes. You teach them the
+failings of mankind as they revealed themselves in an age of primitive
+transgression. I say I never try to train a horse that way. On the
+contrary I try to let all the ancestral memories slumber, and I take all
+the ancestral powers and develop them for modern uses. Why, listen. We
+know that a horse's teeth were once useful as a weapon to bite its
+enemies. Now I try to give it the notion that its teeth are only useful
+in feeding. You know that its hoofs were used to strike its enemies: it
+stood on its forefeet and kicked in the rear; it stood on its hind feet
+and pawed in front. You know that the horse is timid, it is born timid,
+dies timid; but had it not been timid, it would have been exterminated:
+its speed was one of its means of survival: if it could not conquer, it
+had to flee and the sentinel of its safety was its fear; it was the most
+valuable trait it had; this ancestral trait has not yet been outlived;
+don't despise the horse for it. But now I try to teach a horse that feet
+and legs and speed are to serve another instinct--the instinct to win in
+the new maddened courage of the race-course. And I never allow the horse
+to believe that it has such a thing as an enemy. He is not to fear life,
+but to trust life. I teach him that man is not his old hereditary enemy,
+but his friend--and his master. I would not suggest to a horse any of
+its latent bad traits. I never prohibit its doing anything. I never try
+to teach it what not to do, but only what to do. And so I have good
+colts, and you have--but excuse me!"
+
+The minister stood up and brushed the shavings from his lap and legs;
+then as he took his seat he covered his side of the discussion with one
+breath:--
+
+"I hold to the old teaching--good from the foundation of the world--that
+the old must tell the young what not to do."
+
+"Aleck," replied the vicar of the stables with his quaint sunniness,
+"don't you know that no human being can teach any living thing--man or
+beast or bird or fish or flea--_not_ to do a thing? you can only teach
+_to do_. If there is a God of this universe, He is a God of doing. You
+can no more teach 'a not' than you can teach 'a nothing.' Now try to
+teach one of your sons nothing! This world has never taught, and will
+never teach, a prohibition, because a prohibition is a nothing; it has
+never taught anything but the will and desire to do: that is the root of
+the matter. Do you suppose I try to keep one of my cows from kicking
+over the bucket of milk by tying her hind legs? I go to the other end of
+the beast and do something for her brain so that when she feels the
+instinct to kick which is her right, what I have taught her will compel
+her to waive her right and to keep her feet on the ground. That is all
+there is of it."
+
+They were hearty and good-humored in their talk, and the minister did
+not budge: but the boy listened only to his uncle.
+
+"Do you remember, Aleck, when you and I were in the school over yonder
+and one morning old Bowles issued a new order that none of us boys was
+to ask for a drink between little recess and big recess? Now none of us
+drank at that hour; but the day after the order was issued, every boy
+wanted a drink, and demanded a drink, and got a drink. It was thirst for
+principle. Every boy knew it was his right to drink whenever he was
+thirsty--and even when he was not thirsty; and he disobeyed orders to
+assert that right. And if old Bowles had not lowered his authority
+before that advancing right, there would not have been any old Bowles.
+There is one thing greater than any man's authority, and that is any
+man's right. Isn't that the United States? Wasn't that Kentucky country
+school-house the United States? And don't you know, Aleck, that as soon
+as a thing is forbidden, human nature investigates the command to see
+whether it puts forth an infringement of its liberties? Don't you
+_know_, Aleck, that the disobedience of children may be one of their
+natural rights?"
+
+At this point the uncle turned unexpectedly toward his nephew:--
+
+"Does this bore you, Downs?"
+
+Downs remarked pointedly that half of it bored him: he made it perfectly
+clear which was the objectionable half.
+
+The uncle did not notice the discourtesy to his guest, but continued his
+amiable observation:--
+
+"To me it all leads up to this--and now the road turns away from colts
+to the road you and I walk in as men. It leads up to this: the
+difference between failure and transgression. Command to do; and the
+worst result can only be failure. Command not to do; and the worst
+result is transgression. Now we all live on partial failure: it is the
+beginning of effort and the incentive to effort. We try and fail; with
+more will and strength and experience we wipe out the failure and stand
+beyond it. Long afterwards men look back and laugh at their failures,
+love them because they are the measure of what they were and of what
+they have become. It is our life, the glory of more strength, the
+triumph of will and determination. It is the crowning victory of the
+world. And it is the road that leads upward.
+
+"But transgression! No transgression ever develops life; it is so much
+death. You can't wrest victory out of transgression: it's a thing by
+itself--a final defeat. And what has been defeated is your last
+safeguard--your will. Every transgression helps to kill the will. It
+weakens, discourages, humiliates, stings, poisons. The road of
+transgression is downward."
+
+He stood up, and his guest with him. As he lifted his alpaca coat from
+the grass and put it on, there was left lying his bowie-knife, and he
+put that on. It was the bowie-knife age.
+
+"Will you come with us, Downs?"
+
+Downs thought he would now read the newspaper.
+
+"Where is Fred Ousley?" asked the minister of him, knowing that the two
+boys were inseparable.
+
+"He has gone to a picnic."
+
+"Why didn't you go to the picnic?"
+
+"I wasn't invited: it's his cousins'."
+
+"And haven't you any cousins who give picnics?"
+
+"I don't like my cousins: I hate my cousins: Fred hates _his_ cousins:
+it's a girl that goes _with_ his cousins."
+
+"And what about a girl with your cousins?"
+
+"Well, while you're talking, what about your sons and their cousins?
+We're running this farm very well, and we're all pleased. From what I
+have been hearing, it's more than can be said about yours."
+
+The minister laughed good-naturedly at this rudeness as the two friends
+walked away; but the vicar of the stables observed mildly:--
+
+"You gave him the wrong kind of suggestion, Aleck. It wasn't in your
+words exactly; I don't know where it was; but I felt it and he felt it:
+somehow you challenged him to employ his manly art of self-defence; and
+part of that art is to attack. But never mind about Downs. Now come to
+the stable: I am going to show you a young thoroughbred there that has
+never had a disagreeable suggestion made to him: he thinks this farm
+paradise. And the five great things I tried to teach him are: to develop
+his will, to develop his speed, to develop his endurance and
+perseverance, to develop his pride, and to develop his affection: he is
+a masterpiece."
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+In the green yard that summer afternoon, under the white locust blossoms
+and with the fragrance of rose and honeysuckle and lilac all about him,
+the youth lay on the grass beside the newspaper--which he forgot. A new
+world of thinking had been disclosed to him. And he made one special
+discovery: that as far as memory could reach his uncle had never told
+him not to do anything: always it had been to do--never not to do.
+
+And he was a good deal impressed with the difference between failure and
+transgression. He did not at all like that idea of transgression; but he
+thought he should like to try failure for a while; then he could call on
+more strength, tighten his will, develop more fighting power. He rather
+welcomed that combat with failure which would end in success.
+
+He wished Fred were there. It was Saturday he came to stay all night;
+and the two were getting old enough to talk about their futures and at
+what ages each would marry. They described the desirable type of woman;
+and sometimes exchanged descriptions.
+
+And then suddenly he rolled over the grass convulsed with laughter:
+his uncle was raising him as a thoroughbred colt. He approved of
+the training, but somehow he did not feel complimented by the
+classification. Fred would have to hear that--that he was being trained
+as for a race-course.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+The next morning he was sitting in church; and the minister read the
+Commandments.
+
+Hitherto he had always listened to them as the whole congregation
+apparently listened: as to a noise from the pulpit that drew near,
+lasted for a while, and then rumbled on--without being meant for any
+one. But this morning he scrutinized each Commandment with new
+thoughtfulness--and with a new resentfulness also; and when a certain
+one was reached he made a discovery that it applied to men only: "Thou
+shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife."
+
+Why should not wives be commanded not to covet their neighbors'
+husbands? he wondered. Why was the other half of the Commandment
+suppressed? Moses must have been a very polite man! Perhaps there was
+more involved than courtesy: otherwise he might have found life more
+tolerable among the Egyptians: he might have been forced to make the
+return trip across the Red Sea when the waters were inconveniently deep.
+Those Jewesses of the Wandering might have seen to it that he was not to
+have the pleasure of dying so mysteriously on Nebo's lonely mountain:
+his sepulchre would have been marked--and well marked.
+
+He sat there in the corner of the church, and plied his insolent satire.
+Fred Ousley must hear about the second discovery also--the Commandment
+for men only.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+Then three years passed and he was eighteen; and from fifteen to
+eighteen is a long time in youth's life; things are much worse or things
+are much better.
+
+It was one rainy September night after supper, and he and his uncle were
+sitting on opposite sides of the deep fireplace.
+
+Some logs blazed comfortably, and awoke in both man and youth the
+thoughtfulness which lays such a silence upon us with the kindling of
+the earliest Autumn fires. Talk between them was never forced. It came,
+it went: they were at perfect ease with one another in their
+comradeship. The man's long thoughts went backward; the youth's long
+thoughts went forward. The man was smoking, at intervals serenely
+drawing his amber-hued meerschaum from under his thick mustache. The
+youth was not smoking--he was waiting to be a man. Once his uncle had
+remarked: "Tobacco is for men if they wish tobacco, and for pioneer old
+ladies if they must have their pipes. Begin to smoke after you are a
+man, Downs. Cigars for boys are as bad as cigars would be for old
+ladies."
+
+The way in which this had been put rather captured the youth's fancy: he
+was determined to have every inward and outward sign of being a man: now
+he was waiting for the cigar.
+
+He had been hunting with Fred Ousley that afternoon, and just before
+dark had come in with a good bag of birds. A drizzle of rain had
+overtaken him in the fields and dampened his clothing. The truth is that
+he and Ousley had lingered over their good-by; Fred was off for college.
+Supper was over when he reached the house, and he had merely washed his
+hands and gone in to supper as he was, eating alone; and now as he sat
+gazing into the fire, his boots and his hunting-trousers and his dark
+blue flannel shirt began to steam. He was too much a youth to mind wet
+garments.
+
+The man on the opposite side sent secret glances across at him: they
+were full of pride, of a man's idolatry of a scion of his own blood. He
+was thinking of the blood of that family--blood never to be forced or
+hurried: death rather than being commanded: rage at being ordered:
+mingled of Scotch and Irish and Anglo-Saxon--with the Kentucky wildness
+and insolence added. Blood that often wallowed in the old mires of
+humanity; then later in life by a process of unfolding began to set its
+course toward the virtues of the world and ultimately stood where it
+filled lower men with awe.
+
+September was the month for the opening of schools and colleges. The
+boy's education had been difficult and desultory. First he had gone to
+the neighborhood school, then to a boys' select school, then to a
+military school, then to a college. Usually he quit and came home. Once
+he had joined his uncle in another State at the Autumn meeting of a
+racing association--had merely walked up to him on the grounds, eating
+purple grapes out of a paper bag and with his linen trousers pockets
+bulging with ripe peaches.
+
+"Well, Downs," his uncle observed by way of greeting him, as though he
+had reappeared round a corner.
+
+"Who won the last race?" inquired the boy as though he had been absent
+ten minutes.
+
+Now out of the silence of the rainy September night and out of the
+thoughtfulness of the fire, the imperious splendid dark glowing young
+animal steaming in his boots and flannel suddenly looked across and
+spoke:--
+
+"If I am ever going to do anything, it is about time I began."
+
+The philosopher on the other side of the fire grew wary; he had given
+the blood time, and now the blood was mounting to the brain.
+
+"It is time, if you think it is time."
+
+"One thing I am not going to do," said the arbiter of his fate, as if he
+were drawing a surprise from the depths of his nature and were offering
+it to his uncle; if possible, without discourtesy, but certainly without
+discussion--"one thing I am not going to do; I am not going to breed
+horses."
+
+The fire crackled, and no other sound disturbed the stillness.
+
+"Some one else will breed them," replied the vicar of the stables, with
+quietness: the sun always seemed to remain on his face after it had gone
+down. "They will be bred by some one else. The breeding of horses in the
+world will not be stopped because some one does not wish to breed them.
+It will come to the same thing in the end. Even if it does not come to
+the same thing, it will come to something different. No matter, either
+way."
+
+The young hunter had unbuttoned one of his shirt sleeves and bared his
+arm above the elbow; and he now stroked his forearm as he bent it
+backward over the biceps and suddenly struck out at the air as though he
+would knock the head off of an idea.
+
+"My notion is this: I don't want to stand still and let my horse do the
+running. If I have a horse, I want it to stand still and let me do the
+running. If there is any excitement for either of us, I want the
+excitement. I don't care _to own_ an animal that wins a race: I want _to
+be_ the animal that wins a race."
+
+"Then be the animal that wins the race! The horse will win his races: he
+will take care of himself: win your race."
+
+"I intend to win my race."
+
+There was silence for a while.
+
+"As it is not to be horses, then, I have been thinking of other things I
+might do."
+
+"Keep on thinking."
+
+"You might help me to think."
+
+"I am ready to think with you; you can only think for yourself."
+
+"What about going into the army?"
+
+"You just said you wanted excitement. There is no excitement in the army
+unless there is war. We have just passed through one war, and I don't
+think either of us will live to see another. Still, if you wish, I can
+get you to West Point. Or, if you prefer the navy, I can get you to
+Annapolis."
+
+"No Annapolis for me! I wouldn't live on anything that I couldn't walk
+about on and sit down on and roll over on. No water for me. I'll take
+land all round me in every direction. I guess I'll leave the sea to the
+Apostle Peter. Life on land and death on land for me. Hard showers and
+streams and ponds and springs--that will do for water. No Annapolis,
+thank you!"
+
+"West Point, then."
+
+"If I went into the army, wouldn't I have to leave the farm here?"
+
+"You'd have to leave the farm here unless the Government would quarter
+some troops here for your accommodation. In case of war, you might
+arrange with the enemy to come to Kentucky and attack you where you
+would be comfortable."
+
+The future officer of his country did not smile at this: his manner
+seemed to indicate that such a concession might not be so absurd. He did
+not budge from his position:--
+
+"I'd rather do something that would let me live here."
+
+"You could live here and study law: some of the greatest members of the
+Kentucky bar have been farmers. You could live here and practise law in
+the country seat."
+
+"Suppose I studied law and then some day I were called to the Supreme
+Bench: wouldn't that take me away?"
+
+"It might take you away unless the Supreme Court would get down from its
+Bench and come and sit on your bench--always to accommodate you."
+
+"I don't know about law: I'll have to think: law _does_ make you think!"
+
+"There is the pulpit: some of the greatest Kentucky divines have been
+bluegrass farmers--though I've always wished that they wouldn't call
+themselves divines. It's more than Christ did!"
+
+"The pulpit! And then all my life I'd be thinking of other people's
+faults and failings. A fine time I'd have, trying to chase my friends to
+hell."
+
+The next suggestion followed in due order.
+
+"There's Oratory; some of the great Kentucky orators have been bluegrass
+farmers. There is Southern Oratory."
+
+"Oratory--where would I get my gas?"
+
+"Manufacture it. It always has to be manufactured. The consumer always
+manufactures."
+
+"If I went in for oratory, you _know_ I'd come out in Congress; you know
+they always do: then no farm for me again."
+
+"That is, unless--you know, Congress might adjourn and hold its
+sessions--that same idea--to accommodate you--!"
+
+"I'd like to be a soldier and I'd like to be a farmer, if I could get
+the two professions together."
+
+"They went together regularly in pioneer Kentucky. The soldiers were
+farmers and the farmers were soldiers."
+
+"And then if I could be a doctor. That's what I'd like best. To be a
+soldier and a farmer and a doctor."
+
+"Men were all three in pioneer Kentucky. During the period of Indian
+wars the Kentucky farmer and soldier, who was the border scout, was also
+sometimes the scout of Æsculapius."
+
+"Æsculapius--who was he? Trotter, runner, or pacer?"
+
+"He set the pace: you might call him a pacer."
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+What a sense of deep peace and security and privacy there was in the two
+being thus free to talk together of life and the world--in that
+womanless house! No woman sitting beside the fire to interject herself
+and pull things her way; or to sit by without a sign--and pull things
+her way afterwards--without a sign.
+
+The physical comfort of the night, and the rain, and the snug hearth
+awoke a desire for more confidences.
+
+"Tell me about the medical schools when you were a student. Not about
+the professors. I don't want to hear anything about the professors. You
+wouldn't know anything about _them_, anyhow: no student ever does. But
+what were the students up to among themselves at nights? The wild ones.
+I don't want to hear anything about the goody-goody ones. Tell me about
+the devils--the worst of the devils."
+
+The medical schools of those days, as members of the profession yet
+living can testify if they would, had their stories of student life that
+make good stories when recited around the fireside with September rain
+on the roof. The former graduate and non-practitioner was not averse
+seemingly to reminiscence. Forthwith he entered upon some chronicles and
+pursued them with that soft, level voice of either betting with you or
+baptizing you--the voice of gambling in this world or of gambling for
+the next.
+
+As the recitals wound along their channels, the listener's enthusiasm
+became stirred: by degrees it took on a kindling that was like a wild
+leaping flame of joy.
+
+"But there always has to be a leader," he said, as though forecasting
+for himself a place of such splendid prominence. "There has to be a
+leader, a head."
+
+"I was the head."
+
+The young hunter on the opposite side of the fireplace suddenly threw up
+his arms and rolled out of his chair and lay on the floor as though he
+had received a charge of buckshot in one ear. At last, gathering himself
+up on the floor, he gazed at the tranquil amber pipe and tranquil
+piper:--
+
+"_You!_"
+
+There was a mild wave of the hand by the historian of the night, much as
+one puts aside a faded wreath, deprecating being crowned with it a
+second time.
+
+"Another shock like that----!" and the searcher for a profession climbed
+with difficulty into his chair again. For a while there was satisfied
+silence, and now things took on a graver character:--
+
+"Somehow I feel," said the younger of the men, "that there have been
+great men all about here. I don't see any now; but I have a feeling that
+they have been here--great men. I feel them behind me--all kinds of
+great men. It is like the licks where we now find the footprints and the
+bones of big game, larger animals that have vanished. There are the
+bones of greater men in Kentucky: I feel their lives behind me."
+
+"They _are_ behind you: the earth is rank with them. You need not look
+anywhere else for examples. I don't know how far you got in your Homer
+at school before you were tired of it; but there is the _Iliad_ of
+Kentucky: I am glad you have begun to read _that_!"
+
+The rain on the shingles and in the gutters began to sound like music.
+The two men alone there in their talk about life, not a woman near, a
+kind of ragged sublimity.
+
+"To be a soldier and to be a farmer--if I could get those two
+professions together," persisted the youth.
+
+"In times of peace there is only one profession that furnishes the
+active soldier: and that is the profession of medicine. It is the
+physician and the surgeon that the military virtues rest on; and the
+martial traits when there is no war. It is these men that bring those
+virtues and those traits undiminished from one war to the next war.
+There is no kind of manhood in the soldier, the fighting man, that is
+not in the fighting physician and fighting surgeon--fighting against
+disease. There is nothing that has to be changed in these two when war
+breaks out or when peace comes: their constant service fits them for
+either. In times of peace the only warlike type of man actively engaged
+in human life is the doctor and surgeon. Did you ever think of that?"
+said the older man, persuasively.
+
+The silence in the room grew deeper.
+
+"Tell me about the professions in the War: what did they do about it;
+how did they act?"
+
+"The professions divided: some going with North, some going with South;
+fighting on each side, fighting one another. The ministry dividing most
+bitterly and sending up their prayers on each side for the destruction
+of the other--to the same God. All except one: the profession of
+medicine remained indivisible. For that is the profession which has but
+a single ideal, a single duty, a single work, and but one patient--Man."
+
+The silence had become too deep for words.
+
+The young hunter quietly got up and lit his candle and squared himself
+in the middle of the floor, pale with the sacred fire of a youth's
+ideal.
+
+"I am going to be a Kentucky country doctor. Good night!" He strode
+heavily out of the room, and his stride on the stairway sounded like an
+upward march toward future glory.
+
+The man at the fire listened. Usually when the youth had reached his
+room above and set his candle on his stand beside his bed, he undressed
+there as with one double motion of shucking an ear of corn: half to
+right and half to left; and then the ear stood forth bared in its
+glistening whiteness and rounded out to perfect form with clean
+vitality. But now for a long time he heard a walking back and forth, a
+solemn tread: life's march had begun in earnest.
+
+He rose from his chair and tapped the ash out of his meerschaum. Through
+force of habit and old association with the race-course he looked at his
+timepiece.
+
+"I win that race in good time," he said. "That colt was hard to manage,
+obstreperous and balky."
+
+It had always been his secret wish that his nephew would enter the
+profession that he himself had spurned. Perhaps no man ever ceases to
+have some fondness for the profession he has declined, as perhaps a
+woman will to the last send some kind thoughts toward the man she has
+rejected.
+
+After winning a race, he always poured out a libation; and he went to
+his sideboard now and poured out a libation sixteen years old.
+
+And he did not pour it on the ground.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+And now eight years followed, during which the youth Downs Birney became
+young Dr. Birney--a very great stage of actual progress. Seven away from
+Kentucky, and one there since his return. Of those seven, five in New
+York for a degree; and two in Europe--in Berlin, in Vienna--for more
+lectures, more hospital work, another degree. At the end of the second
+he returned incredibly developed to Kentucky, to the manor house and the
+stock farm; and to the uncle to whom these years had furnished abundance
+of means whereby to get the best of all that was wisely to be gotten: an
+affectionate abundance, no overfond super-abundance, no sentimentality:
+merely a quiet Kentucky sun throwing the energy of its rays along that
+young life-track--hanging out a purse of gold at each quarter-stretch,
+to be snatched as the thoroughbred passed.
+
+A return home then to a neighborhood of kinships and friendships and to
+the uphill work which could so easily become downhill sliding--the
+practice of medicine among a people where during these absences he had
+been remembered, if remembered at all, as the wildest youth in the
+country. When it had been learned what profession he had chosen, the
+prediction had been made that within a year Downs would reduce the
+mortality of the neighborhood to normal--one to every inhabitant!
+
+But at the end of this first year of undertaking to convert ridicule
+into acceptance of himself as a stable health officer and confidential
+health guardian, he was able to say that he had made a good start:
+neighbors have long memories about a budding physician's first
+cases--when he fails. Young Dr. Birney had not failed, because none of
+his cases had been important: when there was danger, it was considered
+safe to avoid the doctor: the only way in which he could have lost a
+patient would have been to murder one! Thus he had entered auspiciously
+upon the long art and science of securing patients. But he had secured
+no wife! And he greatly preferred one impossible wife to all possible
+patients. That problem meantime had been pressing him sorely.
+
+The womanless house in which he had been reared and his boyhood on a
+stock farm had rendered him rather shy of girls and kept him much apart
+from the society of the neighborhood. Nevertheless even in Europe before
+his return--with the certainty of marriage before him--he had recalled
+two or three juvenile perturbations, and he had resolved upon arrival to
+follow these clues and ascertain what changes seven years had wrought in
+them. There was no difficulty in following the clues a few weeks after
+getting back to Kentucky: they led in each case to the door of a growing
+young family: and out of these households he thereupon began to receive
+calls for his services to sick children: all the perturbations had
+become volcanoes, and were now on their way to become extinct craters.
+
+So he was clueless. He must make his own clues and then follow. Nor
+could there be any dallying, since he could not hope to succeed in his
+profession as a young unmarried physician: thus pressure from without
+equalled pressure from within.
+
+Moreover, he was pleasantly conscious of a general commotion of part of
+the population toward him with reference to life's romance. The girls of
+that race and land were much too healthy and normally imaginative not to
+feel the impact of the arrival of a young doctor--who was going to ask
+one of them to marry him. As to those seven years of his in New York and
+Europe, he could discover only one mind in them: they deplored his
+absence not because they had missed _him_, but because he had missed
+_them_: it was no gain to have been in New York and Berlin and Vienna if
+you lost Kentucky! He gradually acquired the feeling that if in addition
+to the misfortune of having been absent for several years, the calamity
+had been his of having been born abroad, it would not have been
+permitted him to plough corn.
+
+But while they could not abet him in the error of thinking that he had
+returned a cosmopolitan, bringing high prestige, instantly they showed
+general excitement that he--one of themselves--was at home again in
+search of a wife. He had arrived like a starving bee released in a ripe
+vineyard; and for a while he could only whirl about, distracted by
+indecision as to what cluster of grapes he should settle on: not that
+the grapes did not have something to say as to the privilege of
+alighting. After the bee had selected the bunch, the bunch selected the
+bee. A vineyard ripe to be gathered--and being gathered! Every month or
+so a vine disappeared--claimed for Love's vintage--stored away in Love's
+cellar.
+
+They were everywhere! As he drove widely about the country, the two most
+abundant characteristics seemed to be unequalled grass and marriageable
+girls. He met them on turnpikes and lanes--in leafy woods at picnics--at
+moonlight dances--on velvet lawns--amid the roses of old gardens--and he
+began humorously to count those who looked available. One passed him on
+the road one day, and, lifting a corner of the buggy curtain, she peeped
+back at him: "She will do!" he said. Another swept past him on horseback
+and looked in the opposite direction. "She will do!" he said. He met two
+on a shady street of a quiet town under their peach-blow parasols: "They
+will do!" he said. He saw four on a lawn playing tennis, and watched
+their vital abandon and tasted their cup: "They will do!" he said. He
+swept his eyes over a ball-room one night: "They will all do!" he said,
+and made an end of counting.
+
+Into this world of romance and bride-seeking the doctor launched himself
+formally under brilliant auspices of earth and sky and people one
+beautiful afternoon of early summer: it was on the grounds of one of the
+finest old country places at a lawn party with tennis matches. It was
+his first appearance as a candidate for life's greater game. A large
+gallery of onlookers, seated along a trellis of vines and roses,
+measured him critically as he stepped out on the court: he knew it and
+he challenged the criticism. In his white flannels; his big bared head
+covered with curling black hair; his neck half bare in its virile
+strength; his big grayish blue eyes flashing with glorious health, full
+of good humor and of deeper warmth; his big half-bared arms strong to
+hold in love or to lift in pain; the big stub nose of tenacity; the big
+red mouth that laughing revealed the big thick white teeth, good to tear
+and grind their way: his twenty-six years of native Kentucky insolence
+capped with a consciousness of travel and knowledge of his own authority
+and power--youthful white soldier of the clean,--the neighborhood's
+evangelist of life and death,--he looked like a good partner for the
+afternoon or for life. One girl, seeing all this--and more--repeated to
+herself, she did not know why, Blake's poem on the Tiger.
+
+His partner that afternoon was his hostess--a Kentucky girl just home
+from her Northern college as a graduate. She too had been away for
+several years; and they had this in common as the first bond--that they
+had arrived as comparative strangers and saw their home surroundings
+from the outside: they spoke of it: it introduced them.
+
+There was tension in the play for this reason; and for others: this
+first public appearance with so much going on in imagination and
+sympathy. Too great tension developed as the battle of the racquets went
+on: so that the doctor's partner, overreaching and twisting, sprained an
+ankle, and the games ended for them: she was assisted upstairs, and he
+applied his skill and his treatment.
+
+As he drove home he thought a good deal of his partner: of her proud
+reserve toward him out of the game and of her inseparable blending of
+herself with him in the game; her devotion to their common cause; her
+will not that she should win but that both should win; her unruffled
+ignoring of a bad play of his or a bad play of her own; the freshened
+energy of her attack after a reverse; her matter-of-course pleasure when
+he played well or when she played well; the complete surrender of
+herself to him for the game--after which instantly there was nothing
+between them except the courtesy of a hostess. He thought of these
+traits. And then he recalled her fortitude during the acute suffering
+with that twisted ankle! How contemptuously she had borne pain!
+
+"That little foot," he said, moved to admiration, "that little foot
+makes the true footprint of the greater vanished people! She is of the
+blood of male and female heroes: she knows how to do and she knows how
+to suffer! Now if I fall in love with her--!" and there surged through
+him the invitation to do so.
+
+But at the end of his first year the doctor felt that he had made only a
+general advance toward the long battle-line of Love; he had
+reconnoitred, but he had not attacked; he had a vast marital receptivity
+embracing many square miles. He had slid his hands along the nuptial
+rope, but he could not as yet discover who was waiting beside the bridal
+knot.
+
+On the other hand, there were two or three cases of wounded on the other
+side; and if one could have been privileged to stand near, it would have
+been possible to see Love's ambulances secretly and mournfully moving
+here and there to the rear. If as much as this could not be said for
+him, what right would he have had to be practising there--or to be alive
+anywhere!
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+And now the winter of that first year had come: it brought an immense
+stride--in Progress.
+
+It was the twenty-fourth of December. Darkness was beginning to fall on
+road and woods and fields; and he was driving rapidly home because he
+was tired and ravenous and because he was thinking of his supper--always
+that good Kentucky supper. But to-night he would have to eat solitary
+because some days previous his uncle had gone to New York--gone in his
+quiet way: announcing the fact one morning and stopping there--his
+reasons were his own.
+
+About a mile from home the doctor's horse, rushing on through the
+gathering Christmas twilight, began to overtake a vehicle moving at a
+stately pace as though its mission involved affairs too elaborate for
+haste. As he approached from the rear he recognized that it was
+Frederick Ousley's carriage, returning from his afternoon wedding
+several miles across the country.
+
+He had never met the girl that his friend was to marry: her home was in
+another neighborhood, and the demands of this first year upon him had
+been too many. He had not even had time to go to the wedding. Now he
+checked his horse in order not to pass the carriage, and at a respectful
+distance of a few yards constituted himself its happy procession. At the
+front gate it turned in and rolled through the woods to the house, the
+windows of which were blazing with candles--bridal lights and the lights
+of Christmas Eve! He stopped at the gate and followed the progress of it
+as it intercepted the lights now of one window and now of another as it
+wound along the drive. Leaning forward with his forearms on his knees
+and peering from the side-curtain, he saw the front doors thrown open,
+or knew this by the flood of radiance that issued from the hall; saw the
+young master of the house walk to the top step of his porch and there
+turn and wait to receive his bride--in true poetic and royal and manly
+fashion: wishing her to come to him as he faced her on his threshold; he
+saw arms outstretched toward her, saw her mount falteringly and give her
+hands; and saw them walk side by side into the hall: the servants closed
+in upon them, the doors closed upon the servants.
+
+Christmas Eve--Night of Nativity--Home--Youth--Love--Firelight and
+Darkness--One another!
+
+As the doctor watched, that vision sank into him as an arrow which had
+been shot into the air years before and had now hit its mark. He
+straightened himself abruptly and gave the rein to his horse with a
+feeling that the shaft stuck in its wound. Then with a vigorous shake of
+his head he said to himself:--
+
+"Dr. Birney, there is a young man in this buggy who needs your best
+attention: see that he gets it and gets it quickly."
+
+He found his supper awaiting him: and some intelligence which drove
+appetite away and drove him away, leaving the supper uneaten: it was a
+letter from his uncle--one of those tranquil letters:--
+
+"They think they will have to perform an operation on me, but I want
+your opinion first. I trust your judgment beyond that of any of them,
+old and experienced as they are: and I should have sought your judgment
+before coming away if I could have felt sure that it would be needed:
+unless it were needed, I did not wish you to know. You had better start
+without losing very much time. They seem to regard the case as urgent
+and uncertain.
+
+"If anything should happen before you are able to reach me, these few
+words will be my last.
+
+"You have long since entered, Downs, into possession of part of what you
+will inherit from me: and that is your acquaintance with the
+imperfections of my character and the frailties of my life. There has
+been much in it that even a worse man might regret, but nothing of which
+any better man could be ashamed. You have always guarded this part of
+your inheritance as your sacred private personal property. My request is
+that you will hereafter make as little account of it as possible; I hope
+you will never be tempted to draw upon it as a valuable fund; and as
+early as time permits, put the memory of it away to gather its oblivion
+and its dust.
+
+"You will find that everything of value I possess has been left to you.
+You think I have loved horses; I have loved nothing but you. I have
+loved you because you were worthy of it; but I should have loved you if
+you had not been worthy. The horses meant a good deal to me in life, but
+they mean nothing in death.
+
+"I believe you will be one more great Kentucky country doctor. And
+whatever race you may have to run in this world, whether you win or
+whether you lose, I know it will be a hard, a gallant, struggle: that is
+all the thoroughbred can ever do. Having delivered over to you
+everything I own and retaining only the things I cannot will away,--my
+judgment, my confidence in you, and my devotion to you,--I wager these
+that you will win life's race and win it gloriously. My last bet--with
+my last coin--you will win!
+
+"If this is good-by--good-by."
+
+It was several weeks before he returned, bringing with him all that was
+earthly of one whose races were over and who himself had just been
+entered for the unknown stake of the Great Futurity.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+Now February had reappeared, and with it came another stage of Progress.
+When he entered the breakfast room one morning--always to a hearty
+breakfast--he went first to the windows and looked out at the low dark
+clouds shrouding the sky and the rapidly whitening earth: it was snowing
+heavily. As he turned within, the bleakness out of doors brightened the
+fire and added its comfort to the breakfast table. While he was pouring
+out his coffee, suddenly through one window an object appeared; and
+looking out, he saw Frederick Ousley on horseback at the foot of the
+pavement: he was but half seen, laughing and beckoning amid the thickly
+falling flakes.
+
+The doctor rushed out to the porch, and young Ousley spurred his horse
+up to the side of it, riding over flower-beds, trampling and ruining
+plants that happened not now to be in bloom. The two friends after a
+long crushing grip poured out their friendship with eye and speech,
+greeting and laughter.
+
+Two products of that land. With much in sympathy, with no outward
+resemblance: one of little mingled Anglo-Saxon blood: the other of
+Scotch-Irish Anglo-Saxon strains which have created so much history
+wherever they have made their mortal fight. The young Kentucky
+Anglo-Saxon on his horse, blond-haired, blue-eyed, with heavy body and
+heavy limbs, a superb animal to begin with, wheresoever and in
+whatsoever the animal might end: the snow on the edges of his yellowish
+hair and close-clipped beard; around his neck, just visible inside his
+upturned coat collar, a light blue scarf, a woman's scarf, tied there as
+he had started by tender fingers that had perhaps craved the mere
+touching of his flesh: the scarf, as it were, of Lohengrin blue; for
+there was something so knightly about him, he radiated such a passion of
+clean young manhood, that you all but thought of him as a Kentucky
+Lohengrin--whom no Elsa had questioned too closely, and for whom there
+would never be a barren return to Montserrat.
+
+Facing him, the young Kentucky Scotch-Irish Anglo-Saxon, physical equal,
+physical opposite: dark and swarthy soldier of the South: as he stood
+there giving you no notion that for him waited the crimson-dyed cup of
+Life's tragic brew, topped at this moment with the white dancing foam of
+youth and happiness.
+
+They talked rapidly of many things. Then the object of the visit was
+disclosed--with an altered voice and manner:--
+
+"As soon as you have had breakfast, Downs, I wish you would come over.
+Mrs. Ousley is not very well. She would like to see you."
+
+Then he added with affectionate seriousness: "I have told her about you:
+how we have known each other all our lives, have played together, hunted
+together, slept together, travelled together, studied together. She
+knows all about you! I have prepared the way for you to be her
+physician. There was a great difficulty there--that question of her
+physician: you will know _that_, when you know _her_!"
+
+A new look had come into his eyes: he stood as on the peak of
+experience--the true mountain-top of the life of this world.
+
+"I will come at once."
+
+Young Ousley, with a sudden impulse, perhaps to conceal his own sacred
+emotion, rode over to a window of the breakfast room and peered in at
+the waiting table with its solitary chair at the head. He raised his
+voice as though speaking to an imaginary person inside:
+
+"How do you do, Mrs. Birney?" he said. "Could I speak to the doctor a
+moment? I should like to have his private ear professionally: could you
+pass one of his ears out?"
+
+The doctor stooped and scraped together a snowball from the edge of the
+porch, and with a soft toss hit him in the face:--
+
+"Take that for speaking to Mrs. Birney through a window! And Mrs. Birney
+is not my office boy. And I do the passing out of my own ears--to any
+desired distance."
+
+The young husband rode back to the porch, wiping the snow out of his
+laughing eyes: they looked blue as with the clear laughter of the sky.
+
+"That will never do!" he said with a backward motion of his head toward
+the solitary chair at the breakfast-table. "What right have you to
+defraud a girl out of all that happiness?"
+
+"I am not defrauding a girl out of all that happiness: I am being
+defrauded. I am not the culprit: I am the victim. As a consequence of
+trying to save the lives of other husbands, I have nearly come to my own
+death as a bachelor: I have about succumbed to inanition: I am a mere
+Hamlet of soliloquy--and abstention."
+
+It was the last playfulness of boyhood friendship, of a return to old
+ways of jesting when jesting meant nothing. But the glance into the
+breakfast room--those rallying words--the return of the snowball into
+the face--were the ending of a past: each felt that this was enough of
+it.
+
+As young Ousley rode away, he wheeled his horse at the distance of some
+yards and called back formally:--
+
+"Mrs. Ousley would like to see you as soon as you can come, doctor."
+
+It was a professional command.
+
+"I'll come immediately after breakfast."
+
+"Thank you."
+
+"Thank _you!_"
+
+They had assumed another relation in life: on one side of a chasm was a
+young husband with his bride; on the other, the family physician.
+
+As Dr. Birney poured out his coffee and buttered his biscuit, he said to
+himself that now the bread of life was being buttered.
+
+When he reached the Ousleys', the youthful husband met him on the
+veranda and threw an arm around his shoulder affectionately and led him
+in; and when some time later they reappeared, both talked gravely and
+parted, bound by a new bond of dependence and helpfulness between man
+and man.
+
+For the next few days there developed in Dr. Birney a novel
+consciousness that his interest in marriage had enormously deepened, but
+that interest in his own marriage had received a setback: the feeling
+was genuine, and it troubled him. The tentative advances into social
+life that he had been making seemed to have ended in blind paths; the
+growing ties snapped like threads upon which some displaced weight has
+fallen.
+
+What he had been looking for it seemed to him that he had found too late
+in Josephine Ousley. Had he found her before her marriage, he would have
+looked at no other, nor have wavered a year. The actual significance of
+this was that he had encountered one of the persistent dreams of
+mankind--the dream of ideal love and ideal marriage with one who is
+unattainable.
+
+The history of the race, of its art, of its literature, has borne
+through ages testimony to the vividness and to the tyranny of this
+obsession, this mistake, or this truth which may be one of Nature's
+deepest. For it may be error and it may be truth, or sometimes the one
+and sometimes the other. It may be one of the vast forces in Nature
+which we are but now beginning to observe--one of her instincts of
+intuitive selection which announces itself instantly and is never to be
+reversed: such an instinct as governs the mating of other lives not
+human. But there it is in our own species for us to make out of it what
+we can. There are men who for the rest of their lives look back upon the
+mere sight of some woman, a solitary brief meeting with her, as though
+that were their natural and perfect union. There are women who are
+haunted by the same influence and allegiance to some man--seen
+once--perhaps never seen at all except in a picture. Among the dreams of
+humanity about ideal strength, ideal wisdom, ideal justice and charity
+and friendship, this must be set apart as its dream of ideal love; and
+as all high and beautiful dreams about human nature are welcome,
+provided only we never awaken from them, let those who dream thus dream
+on. But the tragedy of it falls upon those who in actual life
+practically supplant the imagined. Let Petrarch dream of Laura, let
+Dante dream of Beatrice, if only the perfections of Laura and Beatrice
+do not come into judgment against the actual wives of Petrarchs and
+Dantes. Let the ideal love of Romeo and Juliet gladden mankind only as a
+dream of the unfulfilled.
+
+Dr. Birney had fallen under the influence of this error, or this truth:
+the bride of his friend instantly filled his imagination as that vision
+of perfection which dreams alone bring to visit us. He was not yet in
+love with her, not a feeling of his nature had yet made its start
+towards her: but she had declared herself as for him the ideal
+woman--ensphered in the unattainable. As proof of this she released in
+him from the hour of his meeting her finer things than he had been aware
+of in his own nature: her countenance, her form, her voice, her whole
+presence, her spirit, disclosed for him for the first time the whole
+glory and splendor of human life and of a man's union with a woman.
+
+As he tried to withdraw his mind from this belief and fix it upon his
+own separate future, he discovered that his outlook was no longer single
+nor clear. Something stood in his path--an irremovable obstacle.
+Sometimes in sleep we try to drive around an obstruction in our road,
+and as often as we drive around it it reappears where it was before:
+such an obstruction had obtruded itself across his progress.
+
+During the following weeks he was often at the Ousleys'--to supper, as a
+guest in their carriage on visits and to parties: the three were almost
+inseparable. One night at supper young Ousley again brought up the
+subject of the doctor's marriage and twitted him for hesitancy:
+unexpectedly the subject was thrust back into the speaker's teeth: there
+was an awkward silence--very curious--
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+And now there befell the doctor one of those peculiar little
+progressions or retrogressions which prove a man not to be utterly
+forlorn. He had ceased to make social calls, and had begun to decline
+invitations; and so into the air there was wafted that little myth which
+went wandering over the country from house to house: the familiar little
+myth that he had been rejected. This myth of the rejected!--this little
+death-web wound about the unsuccessful suitor: every eligible man is as
+much entitled to one as every caterpillar to his cocoon.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+He was with Mrs. Ousley when her child was born--he saved her life and
+the child's life and his friend's happiness. And in response he found
+that both of them were now drawing him into that closer friendship which
+rests upon danger shared and passed--upon respect and power.
+
+The first day that Mrs. Ousley sat in her drawing-room with her infant
+across her knees the doctor was there; and as he studied the perfect
+group--husband and wife and child--it seemed to him that behind them
+should have shone the full-orbed golden splendor of this life's ideal
+happiness.
+
+"There is only one way out of it for me," he muttered bitterly as he
+went down the steps. "I must marry and fall in love with my own wife and
+with the mother of my own children."
+
+That afternoon he drove toward the stately homestead of the summer lawns
+and tennis matches--but when he reached the front gate, he drove past.
+
+It was a few months after this, toward the end of a long conversation
+with Mrs. Ousley, in which _she_ now broached with feminine tact and
+urgency the subject of his marriage, it was as he told her good-by that
+there escaped from him the first intimation of his love--unexpectedly as
+an electric spark flashing across a vacuum.
+
+When he was miles away he said to himself:
+
+"This must stop--this must be stopped: if I cannot stop it, some one
+else must help me to stop it."
+
+That afternoon he began again his visits to the stately homestead of the
+lawns and the tennis courts; and a month or two later he drove by and
+said to Mrs. Ousley:--
+
+"I am engaged to be married."
+
+She gave him a quick startled look, thinking not of him, but with a
+woman's intuitive forecast sending her sympathy and apprehension on into
+the life of another woman.
+
+One beautiful summer night of the year following there were bridal
+fights gleaming far and wide over the grounds of this stately country
+place and from all the windows of the house.
+
+The doctor was married.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+About a year later there reached Dr. Birney one morning a piece of
+evidence as to how his reputation was spreading: from another
+neighborhood a farmer of small means rode to his door and besought him
+to come and see a member of his family: this request implied that the
+regular family physician had been passed over, supplanted; and when the
+poor turn against their physicians and discharge them, it is a bad sign
+indeed--for the physicians.
+
+The doctor upon setting out sent his thoughts to this professional
+brother who had been discredited: he would gladly have saved him from
+the wound.
+
+A few miles up the pike he was surprised to meet a well-known physician
+from the city: they knew each other socially and checked their horses to
+exchange greetings.
+
+Dr. Birney lost no time in saying:--
+
+"If you are on the way to my house, I'll turn back."
+
+"I'm going to the Ousleys'. Professor Ousley asked me yesterday to come
+out and see Mrs. Ousley: he said it was her wish."
+
+The two physicians quickly parted with embarrassment.
+
+As Dr. Birney drove on he had received the wound which sometimes leaves
+a physician with the feeling that he has tasted the bitterness of his
+own death: he himself had been pushed aside--discarded from the
+household that meant most to him as physician and man.
+
+He pulled his horse's head into a dirt road and crossed to another
+turnpike and visited his new patient and went on to another county seat
+and put up his horse at a livery stable to be groomed and fed and took
+his dinner at the little tavern and wandered aimlessly about the town
+and started back towards sundown and reached home late in the night and
+went to his rooms without awaking his wife. As he lighted his lamp in
+the library under its rays he saw a note from Mrs. Ousley to them,
+asking their company to supper next evening. His wife had pencilled
+across the top of the page a message that she would not go.
+
+"It is their good-by to me," he said; "when my wife knows that they have
+discharged me, as a woman understands another woman in such a matter,
+she will know the reason; and she will see fully at last what she began
+to see long since."
+
+When he went to the Ousleys', Mrs. Ousley came forward to greet him at
+the side of her husband, and she gave him both hands. And she did what
+she had never done before--she tried with her little hands to take his
+big ones--the hands that had saved her life; and out of the intensity
+and solemnity of her gratitude she looked him in the eyes until the lids
+fell over hers. It was like saying:--
+
+It is not your fault, it is not my fault, it is not the fault of any of
+us: it is life and the fault of life. As I let you go, dear friend, I
+cling to you.
+
+When the evening was over and the moment had come to leave, she was at
+the side of her husband again; and under the chandelier in the hall she
+suddenly looked up to it with a beautiful mystical rapture and
+consecration--as if to the mistletoe of her bridal eve.
+
+And now more years--years--years! But what effect have years upon the
+master passions? What are five years to a master Hatred? What are ten
+years to Revenge? What are twenty to Malice? What is half a century to
+Patience, or fourscore years to Loyalty, or fourscore and ten to
+Friendship, or the last stretch of mortality to waiting Love? The noble
+passions grow in nobility; the ignoble ones grow in ignominy.
+
+And thus it came about that the final stage of the doctor's Progress
+attained dimensions large enough to contain Hogarth's most human four:
+for it represented that _Progress of the Rake_ which sometimes in
+everyday reality coincides with the _Progress of the Harlot_ and with
+the _Progress of Marriage à la Mode_ and with the _Progress of Cruelty_:
+so that he thus achieved as much by way of getting on as may be
+reasonably demanded of any plodding man.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+It was an August day in this same year which was now closing its record
+with the thoughtful days of December. It was afternoon, and it was
+Saturday.
+
+Intervening years had developed the doctor in two phases of growth: he
+looked no older, but he was heavier in trunk and limbs; and he was
+weightier in repute, for he had established far and near his fame as a
+physician. He had patients in remote county seats now, and on this day
+he had been to one of those county seats to visit a patient, and had
+found him mending. As he quitted the house with this responsibility
+dropped, it further reminded him that within the range of his practice
+he had not for the moment a single case of critical illness or of any
+great suffering. Whereupon he experienced the relief, the elastic
+rebound, known perhaps only to physicians when for a term they may take
+up relations of entire health and happiness with their fellow-beings:
+and when you cease to deal with pain, you begin to deal with pleasure.
+
+With a new buoyancy of foot and feeling he started down to Cheapside,
+the gathering-place for farmers and merchants and friendly town
+folk--most of all on Saturdays. As he strolled along, the recollection
+wandered back to him of how in years gone by--when he was just old
+enough to begin to shave--it was the excitement of the week to shave and
+take his bath and don his best and come to town to enjoy Saturday
+afternoon on Cheapside. The spirit of boyhood flowed back to him: he
+bathed in a tide of warm mysterious waters.
+
+When he reached the public square, he began to shake hands and rub
+shoulders; and to nod at more distant acquaintances; and once under the
+awning of a store for agricultural implements he paused squarely before
+a group of farmers sitting about on ploughs and harrows. They were all
+friends, and at the sight of him they rose in a group, seized him and
+marched him off with them to the hotel to dinner whither they were just
+starting. They were hearty men; it was a hearty meal; there was hearty
+talk, hearty laughter. Middle-aged, red-blooded men of overflowing
+vitality, open-faced, sunbrowned; eating meat like self-unconscious
+carnivora and drinking water like cattle: premium animals in prime
+condition and ready for action: on each should have been tied the blue
+ribbon of agricultural fairs.
+
+The hotel dinner was unusually rich that day because a great circus and
+menagerie had pitched its tents in a vacant lot on the edge of town; and
+there was to be an afternoon and an evening performance, and the town
+was crowded.
+
+The doctor's dinner companions were to join their wives and children at
+the grounds, and very reluctantly he declined their urging to go along:
+as they separated, there rose in him fresh temptation about old Saturday
+afternoon liberties and pleasures--and there fell upon him as a blight
+the desolation of his own home life.
+
+He made his way through excited throngs to the livery stable, and had
+soon started. On the way across town, above low roofs and fences, he
+caught sight of weather-stained canvas tents, every approach toward
+which now had its rolling tide of happy faces, young and aged. At a
+cross street the hurrying people flowed so thoughtlessly about his
+buggy wheels that he checked his horse lest some too careless child
+might be trodden on; and as he sat there, smiling out at them and
+waiting for them to pass, suddenly above the tumult of voices with
+their brotherliness he heard a sound that made him forget his
+surroundings--forget human kinship--and think only of another kinship of
+his to something secret and undeclared: in one of the tents a great
+lonely beast lifted its voice and roared out its deep jungle-cry. The
+primitive music rang above the civilized swarm like a battle-challenge
+uttered from the heart of Nature--that sad long trumpet call of
+instinct--caged and defrauded; a majestic despair for things within that
+could never change and for things without that were never to be enjoyed.
+Shallow and pitiable by comparison sounded the human voices about the
+buggy wheels.
+
+"_To make one outcry like that!--sincere, free! But to be heard
+once--but to be understood at last!_" said the doctor.
+
+When he reached the outskirts of the town, he met vehicles hurrying in
+from the neighborhood and from far beyond it.
+
+It was not long before he saw his own carriage approaching; and his
+children, recognizing him, sprang to their feet and waved tumultuously.
+As the vehicles drew alongside, he looked at them rather
+absent-mindedly:--
+
+"Where are you running off to?" he asked, pretending not to remember
+that permission had been granted weeks before, as soon as the bills had
+been pasted on turnpike fences.
+
+"We're running off to the circus!"
+
+"And what can you possibly be going to do at the circus? Children go to
+a circus--who ever heard of such a thing! I should think you'd have
+stayed at home and studied arithmetic or memorized the capitals of all
+the States."
+
+"Well, as for me," cried Elsie, "I'm pleased to explain what I shall do:
+I shall drink lemonade and sit with the fat woman if there's room for
+both of us on the same plank!"
+
+"And what are _you_ going to do?"
+
+"I'm going to do _everything_, of course! That's my ticket: I don't pay
+for all and see some! I'm going to do everything."
+
+"Everything is a good deal," commented the doctor introspectively.
+"Everything is a good deal; but do what you can toward it--as you have
+paid the price."
+
+For a while he mused how childhood wants all of whatever it craves: its
+desire is as single as its eye. Only later in life we come to know--or
+had better know--that we may have the whole of very little: that a small
+part of anything is our wisest portion, and the instant anything becomes
+entirely ours, it becomes lost to us or we become lost to it: the bright
+worlds that last for ages revolve--they do not collide.
+
+He was still thinking of this when he met the carriage of Professor
+Ousley; and the two middle-aged friends, who in their lives had never
+passed each other on the road without stopping, stopped now. Professor
+Ousley got out and came across to the doctor's buggy and greeted him
+with fresh concerned cordiality.
+
+"It has come at last," he announced, as though something long talked of
+between them could be thus referred to; and he drew out a letter which
+he handed in to be read; it was a call to a professorship in a Northern
+university. As the doctor read it and reread it (continuing to read
+because he did not know what to say)--as he thus read, he began to look
+like a man grown ill.
+
+"You have accepted, of course," he said barely.
+
+"I have accepted."
+
+The friends were silent with their faces turned in the same direction
+across the country--their land, the land of generations of their people.
+This breaking up would be the end for them of the near tie of soil and
+tradition and boyhood friendship and the friendship of manhood.
+
+"Well," said the doctor unsteadily, "this is what you have been working
+for."
+
+"This is what I have been working for," assented Professor Ousley.
+
+These intermediate years had wrought their changes in him also; within
+and without; he was grown heavy, and as an American scholar he had
+weight. The doctor clung for safety to his one theme:--
+
+"You have outgrown your place here in Kentucky. A larger world has heard
+of you and sends for you because it needs you. Well done! But when I
+became a Kentucky country doctor, it was for life. No greater world for
+me! My only future is to try to do better the same work in the same
+place--always better and better if possible till it is over. You climb
+your mountain range; I stay in my valley."
+
+Professor Ousley drew out another envelope:
+
+"Read that," he said a little sadly, and sadness was rare with him: it
+was an advertisement for the town paper announcing for sale his house
+and farm.
+
+"It is the beginning of the end," he said. "It is our farewell to
+Kentucky, to you, to our past, but not, I hope, to our future. Herbert
+and Elizabeth will have to be looked out for in the future: Elizabeth
+may refuse to leave the neighborhood, who knows?" He laughed with
+fatherly fondness and gentleness.
+
+The doctor laughed with him: that plighting of their children!
+
+At this moment a spring wagon came hastening on: it was the servants of
+the Ousley household.
+
+"So you have left your mistress by herself," the master called out to
+them as they passed. They replied with their bashful hilarity that she
+herself had sent them away, that she was glad to be well rid of them. As
+the wagon regained the middle of the road and disappeared, Professor
+Ousley looked at the doctor with a meaning that may have been deeper
+than his smile:--
+
+"She sent us away, too--me and the children. She wanted the day to
+herself. Of course this change, the going away, the wrenching loose from
+memories of life in the house there since our marriage--of course, all
+that no other one of us can feel as she feels it. My work marches away,
+I follow my work, she follows me, the children follow her. Duty heads
+the procession. It pulls us all up by the roots and drags us in the
+train of service: we are all servants, work is lord. I understood her
+to-day--I was glad to bring the children and to be absent from her
+myself: these hours of looking backward and of looking forward are
+sacred to her--it is her woman's right to be alone." He drew the doctor
+into these confidences as one not outside intimate sacred things. The
+doctor made no reply.
+
+He drove on now, not aware how he drove. A few more vehicles passed, and
+then a mile or two farther out no more: they had ceased to come: he was
+entering the silent open country.
+
+A Kentucky landscape of August afternoon--Saturday afternoon! The
+stillness! The dumb pathos of garnered fields--that spectacle of the
+great earth dutiful to its trust and now discharged of obligation! That
+acute pang of seeing with what loyalty the vows of the year have been
+kept by soil and sun, and are ended and are now no more! The first
+intimations also of changes soon to come--the chill of early autumn
+nights when the moon rises on the white frost of fences and stubble, and
+when outside windows glowing with kindled hearths the last roses freeze.
+Of all seasons, of all the days with which nature can torture us, none
+so wound without striking; none awaken such pain, such longing: all
+desire offers itself to be harvested.
+
+There was no glare of sunlight this afternoon, nor any shape of cloud,
+but a haze which took away shadows from fences and bushes and wayside
+trees and weeds, and left the earth and things on it in a radiance
+between light and shadow--between day and darkness. It was a troubled
+brooding: and when the surfaces are quiet, then begins the calling of
+the deeps to the deeps.
+
+As the doctor advanced into this stillness of the land, there reached
+his ear, as one last reverberation, that long lonely roar of the great
+animal homesick and life-sick for jungle and jungle freedom; for the
+right to be what nature had made it--rebellious agony!
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+_A day to herself! She had sent them all away, husband, and children,
+and servants! The right to be alone with memories ... under the still
+surface the invitation of the deeps...._
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+Dr. Birney's buggy was nearing the front gate of Professor Ousley's
+farm. When he reached it, he checked his horse and sat awhile. Then he
+got out and looked up the pike and down the pike: it might have been an
+instinct to hail any one passing--he looked dazed--like a man not
+altogether under self-control. Not a soul was in sight.
+
+He drove in.
+
+The main driveway approached the house almost straight; but a few yards
+inside the gate there branched from it another which led toward the
+sequestered portions of the grounds. It was private and for pleasure: it
+formed a feature of the landscape gardening of earlier times when
+country places were surrounded by parklike lawns and forests and stone
+fences. It skirted the grounds at a distance from the house, passed
+completely round it, and returned to the main driveway at the point
+where it started. Thus it lay about the house--a circle.
+
+Slowly the doctor's buggy began to enclose the house within this circle,
+this coil, this arm creeping around and enclosing a form.
+
+In spots along the drive the shrubbery was dense, and forest trees
+overhung. He had scarcely entered it when a bird flitted across his
+path: softest of all creatures that move on wings, with its long gliding
+flight, a silken voluptuous grace of movement--the rain-crow. It flew
+before him a short distance and alighted on a low overhanging bough--its
+breast turned, as waiting for him. Its wings during that flight
+resembled the floating draperies of a woman fleeing with outstretched
+arms; and as it now sat quiet and inviting, its throat looked like a
+soft throat--bared.
+
+Once the doctor's buggy passed a flower-bed the soil of which showed
+signs of having been lately upturned: a woman's trowel lay on the edge
+of the sod: some one had been working there; perhaps some deep
+restlessness had ended the work. Here the atmosphere was sweet with rose
+geranium and heliotrope: it was the remotest part of the ground,
+screened from any distant view. And once the buggy curtains struck
+against the spray of a rosebush and the petals fell on the empty cushion
+beside the doctor and upon his knees. The horse moved so slowly along
+this forest path of beauty and privacy that no ear could have heard its
+approach as it passed round the house and returned to the main drive.
+Here the doctor sat awhile.
+
+Then he pulled the head of the horse toward the house.
+
+He reached the top of the drive. At the end of a short pavement stood
+the house. The front doors were closed--not locked. It stood there in
+the security of its land and of its history, and of traditions and
+ideals. Undefended except by these: with faith that nothing else could
+so well defend.
+
+On one side of the pavement was built an old-fashioned ornament of
+Southern lawns--a vine-covered, rose-covered summer-house within which
+could be seen rugs and chairs and a worktable: some one had been at
+work; that same deep restlessness had perhaps terminated pastime here.
+Near the other end of the house two glass doors, framed like windows,
+opened upon a single stone step in the grass; and within these doors
+hung a thin white drapery of summer curtains; and under the festoon of
+these curtains there was visible from the doctor's buggy half the still
+figure of a woman--reclining.
+
+She had bespoken a day for solitude. And now she sat there, deep in the
+reverie of the years.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+Surely through that reverie ran the memory of a Christmas Eve when her
+husband had brought her home with him, and, leading her to this same
+bed-chamber, to a place under the chandelier from which mistletoe hung,
+had taken her in his arms; and as his warm breath broke against her
+face, his lips, hardly more than a youth's then, had uttered one
+haunting phrase: _bride of the mistletoe_.
+
+Now had come the year for the closing scene of youth's romance in the
+house--a romance that already for years had been going its quiet way to
+extinction. The shorn group of them were soon to pass out of it into a
+vaster world: the young lover of the hearth had become the middle-aged
+lover of humanity.
+
+And through the reverie ran thoughts of the other man who had been near
+during all this time--defrauded of her--his ideal; baffled in his
+desire; a man with a love of her that had been a long prayer and a
+madness: to whom she owed her life: this other man to be left behind
+here amid the old familiar fields--with his love of her ruining his
+home.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+The doctor got out of his buggy noiselessly. He loosened the horse's
+check-rein without knowing what he did; and the surprised animal turned
+its head and touched him inquiringly in his side with its nose. He
+thrust his forefinger down inside his collar and pulled it with the
+gesture of a man who felt himself choking. He could not--for some
+reason--hear his own feet on the pavement nor on the steps as he mounted
+the porch. On one side in the shadow of old vines stood a settee with
+cushions; and at the head of it a little table with books opened and
+unopened: that same deep restlessness had ended reading. As he grasped
+the knob of the bell, it slipped from his hand and there was a loud
+clangor.
+
+She stepped quickly out upon the stone before her door, and at
+recognition of him, with a smile and gesture of welcome, she disappeared
+within. The next moment the front door was opened wide; but at the sight
+of his face--with an instinct perhaps the oldest that the race knows and
+that needs never to be explained--she took one step backward. Then she
+recovered herself, and, unsupported, she stood there on the threshold of
+her home.
+
+"_Water!_" His death-white lips framed the word without a sound.
+
+He watched her pass quickly down the hall till she disappeared. Turning
+away, he sat down beside the small table of books in the shadow of the
+vines; and he fixed his blood-swollen eyes on the door, waiting for her
+to return. She came unwaveringly, and without a word placed the glass of
+water beside him, and then she passed out of sight behind him.
+
+A long time he remained there. Close to his ear out of the depths of the
+honeysuckle came the twittering of a brood of nestlings as the mother
+went to and fro--a late brood, the first having met with tragedy, or the
+second love-mating of the season.
+
+Then upon the stillness another sound broke--a plain warning to his ear.
+It was a scraping of the buggy wheel against the buggy, showing that his
+horse, finding its check-rein loosened, but being too well trained to
+move, had turned short to crop the grass beside the driveway.
+
+How the homely things, the pitiable trifles reach us amid life's
+immensities!
+
+This overturning of a buggy! The overturning of lives!
+
+He started down the steps, and then midway between the house and the
+buggy he saw her.
+
+She stood a few yards from him across the grass at one of the entrances
+of the summer house where she had been working at her needlework. She
+stood there, not waiting for him to come--but waiting for him to go. For
+years he had followed her as along a path: this was the end of the path:
+neither could go farther.
+
+And now, turning at the end of the path, she meant to make him
+understand--understand her better and understand himself better.
+
+And so she stood there facing him, the whole glowing picture of her
+wifehood and motherhood and womanhood: not in fear nor anger, nor with
+any reproach for him nor any stain for herself: but with the deepest
+understanding and sympathy in a great tragedy--and with her friendship.
+
+Then she turned away and with quiet steps took a slender path which led
+to those sequestered portions of the grounds where she had left her
+trowel and geraniums and heliotropes. Slowly along this labyrinth of
+verdure, under the branches of the old forest trees, she passed. Now a
+shrub partly hid her: once the long bough of a rose tree touched her
+shoulder and dropped the petals of its blossoms behind her. Farther
+away, farther away, then lost down the dim glade.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+The buggy crept homeward along the pike. The horse hung its head low;
+the reins lay on the dashboard; with its obscure sense that something
+was wrong it struck the gait with which it had always yielded obedience
+to the sadnesses of the land--and moved along the highway as behind a
+death.
+
+Past farms of happy husbands and wives and children! Past fences on
+which, a bareheaded boy, he had once liked to come out and sit and watch
+people pass; or to meet his uncle as he returned home. Past the little
+roadside church, its doors and windows so tightly shut now during the
+week, where years before he had sat one morning and had shot the arrow
+of a boy's satire at the Commandment for men only.
+
+Two voices for him that day--the same two that are in every man, the
+only two in any man: the cry of the jungle--I _will_--and the voice of
+the mountain-top--
+
+                            Thou Shalt Not.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+                        EVERGREEN AND THORN TREE
+
+
+FOUR months had elapsed since that August afternoon of summer heat and
+passion--not a lengthy period as reckoned on the mere unemotional
+calendar. But changes in our lives are not measurable by days: we may
+spend eventless years with no inner or outer sign of growth, and then
+some hour may bring a readjustment, an advancement, of our whole being.
+The oriental story of Saul of Tarsus, made a changed man by a voice or a
+vision of heavenly things, is human and natural, and for this reason if
+for no other has been credible to thousands of men--this reversal of
+direction on life's road.
+
+As Dr. Birney now on the morning of this twenty-fourth of December sat
+in his library, trying to make out the bills of the year, and there lay
+disclosed before him the book of the years--the story of his life from
+boyhood up--he by and by abandoned the filling out of blanks against his
+professional neighbors and began to cast up as at the end of no previous
+year his own human debt to the better ideals of his fellow-beings--and
+to himself. And Nature, who was grievously in his debt but had no notion
+of paying, Nature stood at his shoulder and pressed him for settlement
+in that old formula of hers: you need not have opened this account with
+Nature, but since it has been opened, there is no closing it. It runs
+until you are declared bankrupt; and you are not bankrupt until you are
+dead. Then of course as a business firm I shall lose what I have not
+already collected from you; but there are enough others to keep the
+concern prosperous and going. Meantime--make a partial payment _now_:
+payment in suffering, payment in expiation, payment in self-repudiation.
+If you have any funds invested in a habit of inferiority, they are
+acceptable: I levy on them.
+
+One particular fact this morning had riveted Dr. Birney's attention upon
+the slow inexorable grinding of these mills of life.
+
+For years the unhappiness of his domestic affairs--the withdrawal of his
+wife from him under his roof--had by insensible stages travelled as a
+story to all other homesteads in that region. In his own house it had
+always remained a mute tragedy: each of the two who bore the yoke of it
+made no willing sign; each turned toward their world the unbetraying
+countenance. And it must be remembered that half a century ago and less
+you might have journeyed inquisitively through the length and breadth of
+that land and have found probably not one case of divorce nor of
+separation without divorce: among that people marriage was truly for
+better or for worse--a great binding and unalterable sacrament of
+blended lives. If after marriage love's young dream ended, then you
+lived on where you were--wide awake; if all gorgeous colors left the
+clouds and the clouds left the sky, you stood the blistering sun; if it
+turned out to be oil and water poured together, at least it was oil and
+water within the same priceless cruet: and the perpetuity of the cruet
+was considered of more value to society than the preservation of a
+little oil and water.
+
+No divorce then nor separation in his case; nor any voluntary
+vulgarization of the truth, and yet a widely diffused knowledge of this
+truth among neighbors, among his brother physicians, in county seats,
+and away down on that lower level of the domestic servants, the proudest
+experience of whose lives is perhaps the discovery of something to
+criticise in those far above them: is it not a personal triumph to level
+a pocket telescope on the sun?
+
+And all this Dr. Birney had grown used to through Nature's kind
+indurations: all of us have to grow used to so much; and perhaps there
+is no surer test for any of us than how much we can bear. But in one of
+life's directions only--in the direction of his children--his outlook
+had hitherto been as refreshing to him as sunlight on the young April
+verdure of the land. In that direction had still been left him complete
+peace, because there still dwelt spotlessness.
+
+But the father had long dreaded the arrival in his children of an age
+when they must commence to see things in their home which they could not
+understand or in fairness judge. He carried that old dread felt by so
+many parents that by and by the children will be forced to
+understand--and to misunderstand--the lack of something in the house. It
+was for this very reason that permission had the more gladly been
+granted them this year to celebrate their Christmas elsewhere; for this
+festival brings into relief as nothing else the domestic peace of a
+fireside or the discords that mar the lives of those gathered in
+coldness about its warmth.
+
+And now the long expected had arrived. His conversation with his little
+boy that morning before the two children had darted off for their
+Christmas away from home had brought the announcement: the boy was at
+last mature enough to begin to put his own interpretation upon the
+estrangement of his parents. Moreover, the son now believed that he had
+found the father out, had penetrated to his secret; and the doctor
+recalled the words which had conveyed this youthful judgment to him:--
+
+"_If I should get tired of Elizabeth and wanted a little change and fell
+in love with another man's wife--_"
+
+There was the snow-white annunciation! There the doctor got insight into
+the direction that a young life tended to take! There was the milestone
+already reached by the traveller! That is, his son out of devotion to
+him had already entered into a kind of partnership in his father's
+marital unfaithfulness. The boy had laughed in his father's eyes with
+elation at his own loyalty.
+
+These tidings of degeneracy it was that so arrested the doctor on this
+day. The influence of the house had at last reached the only remaining
+field thus far unreached; and now the seeds of suggestion had been
+dropped from one ripened life into new soil, sowing the world's harvest
+over again--that old, old harvest--of tares and tears. Hitherto his
+tragedy had been communicated to his own generation; now it had dropped
+into the next generation: it had been sown past his own life futureward.
+
+The shock of this discovery had befallen him just when Dr. Birney had
+begun to extricate himself from his whole past; when he had begun to
+hope that it might somehow begin to be effaced, sponged away.
+
+For although but four months had passed from that August afternoon to
+this December morning, a great change had been wrought in him.
+
+When on the day following that sad August one he about the middle of the
+forenoon had driven distractedly into Professor Ousley's yard, he saw
+that friend of his youth, the man he loved best of men, the most nearly
+perfect character he knew among men,--he saw him sitting on a rustic
+bench under an old forest tree inside his front gate,--waiting for him.
+Beside him on the bench lay papers over which he was working--not
+because he enjoyed work at that moment probably, but because it was
+impossible to sit there and wait with empty hands--with his mind
+tortured by one thought, the sorrow and shame of this meeting.
+
+As the doctor somehow got out of his buggy and started across the grass
+toward him, he did not look up because he could not look up at once; and
+he did not rise and come to meet him; it was impossible--for a moment.
+But then with a high bracing of himself--he came. And coming, he showed
+in his face only deep emotion, anxiety, distress, such as a true man
+might feel for another true man who had been caught in one of life's
+disasters. As a friend might walk toward a friend who from perfect
+health had by some accident of machinery tottered to him mangled; or as
+to a friend of wealth who through some false investment had by a turn of
+fortune's wheel been left penniless; or as to a friend of sound eyesight
+who had suddenly lost the power of right vision; or as to a friend who
+travelling a straight road across a perilous country had by some atrophy
+or lesion of the brain lost his bearings and was found wandering over a
+precipice.
+
+"How do you do, Downs?" he called out, using the old first name which
+for years now he had dropped, the boyish name of complete boyish
+friendship. "Come and sit down," he said, and he wound his arm through
+the doctor's and all but supported him until they reached the seat under
+the tree.
+
+And then, without waiting or wavering or looking at his friend's face,
+most of all without allowing him to utter a word (like a man aroused to
+the battle of a whole life which concentrated itself then and there), he
+turned to his papers and began to speak of the future--of the
+professorship with its new work, new duties, new services--to the going
+away from Kentucky: not once did he turn the talk away from the new, the
+future, except that when he finished he covered the whole theme by
+saying that the old ties must hold fast and become the dearer for the
+separation. He wanted the doctor's advice, insisted upon having it,
+forced him too on into this future. Not a word, not a look of the eye,
+not a note in the voice, about a thing so near, too near.
+
+"Now this is the end of that," he said, putting the papers away. "But it
+all brings up something else: the farther we go forward, the longer we
+look backward; and the future, this new future, has turned my eyes all
+the more toward the past, Downs, our past--yours and mine!"
+
+And so he began to talk about this past. He went back to their boyhood
+together. He laughed over the time when he began to go to the manor
+house every Saturday to stay all night. He declared that he had expected
+the first time to starve in a house where there were no women; but to
+his astonishment--and relief--he had found that he had devoured things
+as never before. He had not been prepared to say--speaking for the boy
+he then was--that a woman at the table took away his appetite; but there
+was the fact, unquestionable and satisfying, that at the table with
+males only he had discovered bodily abysses within himself that had
+never been called into requisition! He was as frivolous as all this,
+winding quietly along through those happy years.
+
+He recalled another incident: that during one of their first rabbit
+hunts they had fired almost simultaneously at the same rabbit. As
+neither could claim the glory of killing it, they had decided that at
+least they must share equally the glory of its pelt. And so, measuring
+to an equal distance from the tip of its nose and the tip of its tail,
+they had there inserted a penknife and severed the skin; and then,
+propping their boots, soles against soles, like those resolved on a tug
+of war, and each taking hold of his half of the skin, with one mighty
+jerk backwards each was in possession of his trophy! He was as frivolous
+as that. Nor would he ever leave this theme of their friendship, weaving
+about it here and there remembered tricks and escapades as he traced it
+down--this bond in their lives. (There were such friendships in those
+days.)
+
+And so he poured out a man's tribute to a man's friendship; and then
+quickly with a change of tone by which we all may intimate to a visitor
+that his visit is at an end, he bade the doctor take his leave. But he
+did one thing first--one little thing:--
+
+"Josephine sent you these, and told me to pin them on you, with her
+love," he said with a tremor of the mouth, his eyes filling; and taking
+from the lapel of his coat a little freshly plucked bunch of heliotrope
+and rose geranium, he leaned affectionately over against the doctor's
+shoulder and pinned the flowers on his breast.
+
+Then he held out his hand as if to drag the doctor to his feet, walked
+with him to the buggy, pushed him in, put the reins in his palm, and
+gave a slap to the horse to start it.
+
+"Come to see us, Downs," he said; "we can't have you much longer."
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+Truly if the rest of us had nobility enough to treat one another's
+failings with sympathy and understanding, there would be few tragedies
+for us in our human lives, except the inevitable tragedies of nature.
+
+The way in which these two friends instead of turning away from him
+instantly turned toward him, sparing not themselves that they might
+rescue him from what now might swiftly and easily be utter ruin--this
+most human touch of most human nobleness wrought in him a revelation and
+a revolution.
+
+On one day he had gone to the end of the long path of temptation: there
+was relief in that even. And on the next what is finest in human nature
+had come to his rescue. And both of these things changed him. Every day
+since had been changing him. The unlifted shadow that had overlain the
+landscape of his life had begun to break up into moving shadows
+traversed by rifts of light: a ravishing greenness began to reappear in
+the world. That old irremovable obstruction across his road had been
+withdrawn: once again there was a clear path and single vision.
+
+But the sower may become a new character; the growth of what he has
+sowed must go on. And the doctor with a vision clarified and corrected
+now saw thriving everywhere around him young plants the germs of which
+he had so long been scattering. A farmer might from a field by dint of
+infinite patience and searching recover every seed that he had thrown
+forth; but as well might he try to gather back a shower of raindrops
+from dry clods.
+
+And as the doctor sat in his library that morning with this final
+announcement to him of how things sown were growing in the nature of his
+little boy, it seemed to him the moment to call upon Nature for a
+settlement--Nature who never fails to collect a bill, but who never pays
+one. And sitting there with the whole subject before him as a physician
+studying his own case, he asked of Nature whether without any will of
+his own she had not started him in life with too great susceptibility to
+the power of suggestion. Far back when his character was being moulded,
+had not Nature seen to it that wrong suggestions were sown in him? Had
+not all his trouble started there? Was not _he_ harvesting what he had
+not scattered? This immeasurable power of suggestion, this new mystery
+which innumerable minds were now trying to fathom, to govern, to apply.
+This fresh field of research for his own science of medicine--this
+wounding and this healing, this waylaying and misleading, by suggestion.
+This plan of Nature that no human being should escape it, that it should
+be the very ether which all must breathe.
+
+                               * * * * *
+
+
+Meantime out of doors the face of Nature had rapidly changed; his
+forecast of early morning had been fulfilled: the wind had died down,
+clouds had overspread the sky, and it was snowing rapidly. On turnpike
+and lane and crossroads there was falling the dry snow of true winter
+when there is sleighing.
+
+He had given up work and had long been walking restlessly to and fro
+from one room to another; and now as he stood at a window and looked out
+at the mantle of ermine being woven for all unsightly things, at the
+hiding away of the year's blots and stains under the one new
+spotlessness, his thoughts buried themselves with getting out his own
+sleigh and with his trip across country in the afternoon to the homes of
+the sick children. But more intimately he thought of the long drive
+homeward from the distant county seat late that night--with his memories
+of Christmas Eve.
+
+He turned from the window, and going to his office set about the work of
+mending the sleigh-bells. For some reason he did this most quietly lest
+they should send any sound through the stillness of the house. Once as a
+bell tumbled out of its place, instinctively he put his hand over it as
+though it were human and he must silence its mouth of merriment.
+Sleigh-bells seemed out of place in these rooms; they threw their music
+into old wounds. When he had finished, he put them just inside the door
+of the small room opening toward the stable where his man could take
+them away without making any noise.
+
+And now another sound caught the doctor's ear as he was washing his
+hands.
+
+It was half past twelve o'clock; and his wife had entered the
+dining-room to begin some early preparations for dinner, and she was
+alone. She wished no maid to-day, apparently, at least not yet; and as
+she moved familiarly about there reached his ear--very low, sung wholly
+to herself--the melody of a ballad.
+
+The doctor knew it--words and music: it was the _Ballad of the Trees and
+the Master_. In this the poet--a Southern poet who himself alike through
+genius and suffering had entered while on earth into the divine--in this
+the poet had represented the Son of Man as going into the woods when his
+hour was near; into the woods for such strength as the forest only may
+sometimes give us: the same forest out of which humanity itself had
+emerged when it began its troubled history of search for the ideal.
+
+Thus her song was not of the Christmas Tree and of the Manger when
+Divine love arrives; but of the tree of the Crucifixion and of love's
+betrayal and sacrifice ere it goes away. It was not the carol of the
+whole happy world at this hour for Bethlehem, but the hymn of
+Calvary--the music of the thorn tree and of the Crown of Thorns.
+
+And this from his wife on Christmas Eve!--not for his ear: not for any
+one's ear: but to herself alone.
+
+As he listened, with an overmastering impulse he walked to the corner of
+the library and stood before her picture. He noticed that in the
+careless haste of holiday house-cleaning to-day the servant had left on
+the glass of the frame some finger-prints, some particles of dust. He
+brought a little moistened antiseptic sponge and a little red-cross
+gauze, and softly cleaned it as though he were touching a wound. Then he
+returned to the window and watched the snow falling and heard his wife's
+song through to the end.
+
+It was she to whom he owed everything. It was she who, a few years after
+their marriage, having discovered herself to be an unloved bride, had
+thrown her whole agonized nature into the one remaining chance of
+winning his love as young wife and young mother. Having seen that hope
+pass from her, she had withdrawn from one tragedy into a lesser one: she
+had withdrawn from him. And so withdrawing, she held the whole power of
+ruining him. Divorce--open separation--and his career as a physician in
+that land would have been ended.
+
+Instead, she too had come to his rescue. Slowly out of that too swift
+and pitiless a fate for her own life, she had begun to work for the
+success of his: it was of too much value to many to be brought to
+nothingness for the disappointment of one.
+
+The doctor stood there, looking out at the snowstorm and thinking how
+all the people who could most have destroyed him had spared not
+themselves to make him happy and successful and useful.
+
+The dining-room doors were thrown open--he went in to dinner.
+
+
+
+
+                                PART II
+
+
+
+
+                                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_."
+
+    "It stands out in the midst of the year's fiction, and perhaps
+    the fiction of many years, as a thing by itself. There is the
+    spirit of Maeterlinck in these pages blended with the spirit of
+    Hawthorne."--_Current Literature._
+
+    The English press was enthusiastic, the London _Academy_
+    declaring it "worth very many ordinary novels"; "conceived in a
+    fine vision and developed with beauty"; "exercising over us a
+    strong and at times a weird fascination."
+
+    The _Literary World_ sums up: "We may assure the author's
+    innumerable readers and friends that in his latest book he has
+    lost none of the charm that first won them."
+
+    "Exquisite in form, full of color, finely
+    finished."--_Record-Herald_, Chicago.
+
+
+                              PUBLISHED BY
+                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+            Sixty-four and Sixty-six Fifth Avenue, New York
+
+
+
+
+                     MR. JAMES LANE ALLEN'S Novels
+
+
+The Choir Invisible
+
+            _This can also be had in a special edition
+            illustrated by Orson Lowell_         _$2.50_
+
+    "One reads the story for the story's sake, and then re-reads the
+    book out of pure delight in its beauty. The story is American to
+    the very core.... Mr. Allen stands to-day in the front rank of
+    American novelists. _The Choir Invisible_ will solidify a
+    reputation already established and bring into clear light his
+    rare gifts as an artist. For this latest story is as genuine a
+    work of art as has come from an American hand."--HAMILTON W.
+    MABIE in _The Outlook_.
+                                                _Cloth, 12mo, $1.50_
+
+
+The Reign of Law                       A Tale of the Kentucky Hempfields
+
+    "Mr. Allen has a style as original and almost as perfectly
+    finished as Hawthorne's, and he has also Hawthorne's fondness
+    for spiritual suggestion that makes all his stories rich
+    in the qualities that are lacking in so many novels of the
+    period.... If read in the right way, it cannot fail to add
+    to one's spiritual possessions."--_San Francisco Chronicle._
+                                                _Cloth, 12mo, $1.50_
+
+
+The Mettle of the Pasture
+
+    "It may be that _The Mettle of the Pasture_ will live and become
+    a part of our literature; it certainly will live far beyond the
+    allotted term of present-day fiction. Our principal concern is
+    that it is a notable novel, that it ranks high in the range of
+    American and English fiction, and that it is worth the reading,
+    the re-reading, and the continuous appreciation of those who
+    care for modern literature at its best."--E.F.E. in the _Boston
+    Transcript_.
+                                                _Cloth, 12mo, $1.50_
+
+
+Summer in Arcady                                        A Tale of Nature
+
+    "This story by James Lane Allen is one of the gems of the
+    season. It is artistic in its setting, realistic and true to
+    nature and life in its descriptions, dramatic, pathetic, tragic,
+    in its incidents; indeed, a veritable masterpiece that must
+    become classic. It is difficult to give an outline of the story;
+    it is one of the stories which do not outline; it must be
+    read."--_Boston Daily Advertiser._
+                                                      _Cloth, $1.25_
+
+
+                              PUBLISHED BY
+                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+            Sixty-four and Sixty-six Fifth Avenue, New York
+
+
+
+
+                         MR. JAMES LANE ALLEN'S
+
+                            SHORTER STORIES
+
+
+The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky
+
+    "'The simple, rural key-note of life is still the sweetest,' he
+    had written in the opening pages of _The Blue Grass Region of
+    Kentucky_; and it is this note which, played on the pipes of Pan
+    in ever-recurring and fresh variations, yields the sweetest
+    music, and, touched with the breath of his passion for nature,
+    is transmuted into those 'invisible flowers of sound' which lie
+    pressed between his pages."--_The Bookman._
+                                   _Cloth, 12mo, illustrated, $1.50_
+
+
+Flute and Violin
+                 and other Kentucky Tales and Romances
+
+    "He takes us into a green and fragrant world in that Kentucky
+    home of his which he has shared with us so genially and
+    delightfully before now. No one has made more of a native region
+    than he--more beauty and more attractiveness. He has done for
+    the blue grass country what Miss Wilkins has done for New
+    England, what Hamlin Garland has done for some parts of the
+    West."--_Boston Transcript._
+                                   _Cloth, 12mo, illustrated, $1.50_
+
+
+A Kentucky Cardinal
+
+    "A narrative, told with naive simplicity in the first person, of
+    how a man who was devoted to his fruits and flowers and birds
+    came to fall in love with a fair neighbor who treated him at
+    first with whimsical raillery and coquetry, and who finally put
+    his love to the supreme test."--_New York Tribune._
+                                   _Cloth, 12mo, illustrated, $1.00_
+
+
+Aftermath                              A Sequel to "A Kentucky Cardinal"
+
+    "The perfect simplicity of all the episodes, the gentleness of
+    spirit, and the old-time courtesy, the poetry of it all, with a
+    gleam of humor on almost every page."--_Life._
+                                   _Cloth, 12mo, illustrated, $1.00_
+
+
+A Kentucky Cardinal and Aftermath
+
+              _In one volume. Illustrated by Hugh Thomson.    $2.50_
+
+
+Two Gentlemen of Kentucky                                  _Fifty cents_
+
+                              PUBLISHED BY
+                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+            Sixty-four and Sixty-six Fifth Avenue, New York
+
+
+
+
+                           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
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42923 ***