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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77821 ***
+
+
+
+
+  The Man Who Found
+  Christmas
+
+
+
+
+Books By
+
+Walter Prichard Eaton
+
+  “The Idyl of Twin Fires”
+  “In Berkshire Fields”
+  “Green Fields and Upland Pastures”
+  “Skyline Camps”
+  “Penguin Persons and Peppermints”
+
+  _Copyrighted, 1927_
+  W. A. WILDE COMPANY
+  _All rights reserved_
+
+  THE MAN WHO FOUND CHRISTMAS
+
+  MADE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+  The Man Who Found
+  Christmas
+
+  By
+  Walter Prichard Eaton
+
+  Frontispiece by
+  Walter King Stone
+
+  W. A. Wilde Company
+  Boston   ::   Massachusetts
+
+
+
+
+The Man Who Found Christmas
+
+
+A new generation has come into the world since what is here recorded
+took place. There has been a mighty war, when “peace on earth” seemed
+very far away. The automobile has conspired mightily to change our ways
+of life, possibly our ways of thinking and even feeling. You will find
+in this story, dear Reader, mention of forgotten things--sleighbells!
+We today, and especially our young people, are supposed to be more
+sceptical of sentiment than we were of old; so therefore we are
+presumably more sceptical of Christmas, which is the feast and holiday
+of sentiment. But unless this story grievously errs--and how can
+that be, since it took place as set forth just about twenty years
+ago?--young people have been sceptical of sentiment before; and if
+Christmas could prove them wrong then, perhaps it can again. If you and
+I can learn to drive a motor car, surely St. Nicholas can. Maybe the
+old world doesn’t change so much as we little, self-important mortals,
+proud each in our generation, fondly suppose. We may, as we elegantly
+phrase it, have “debunked” a lot of things since good Victoria went to
+her rest and Henry Ford and the Kaiser conspired against ours. But
+here is one bet still laid on Christmas!
+
+Life, of course, may not have been so lively twenty years ago.
+The life of a young bachelor in New York twenty years ago, at any
+rate, was humdrum and conventional. It was not popularly supposed
+to be, but it was. (It certainly isn’t popularly supposed to be
+today, but probably it is.) Wallace Miller was a young bachelor in
+New York, the New York when taxi cabs were a novelty and motion
+pictures cost a nickel, and the only unconventional thing in his
+life was the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association, which
+met every Christmas Eve, and dined. And, alas, even that dinner was
+conventional,--Delmonico’s and dress coats! His profane association
+numbered six members. There was Mercer, who had organized it and
+supplied the original profanity; he was city editor of a daily paper,
+and had to work on Christmas day, so perhaps may be forgiven. There was
+Jack Gleason, formerly one of Mercer’s reporters but now a playwright,
+who supplied most of the good spirits, which Mercer said was no
+wonder, since he had an income of $20,000 a year. There was Gilsey, a
+short, dark, thick-set, scowling man with an astonishing vocabulary of
+invective and all the instincts of a born iconoclast, who by day was
+sub-editor of a mild religious weekly. There were Smith and Stedman,
+brokers and club mates of Miller’s, who resembled closely their kind,
+even to the angle at which they pushed back their hats when sitting in
+the club before dinner. Finally there was Wallace Miller himself, who
+had begun his New York career after leaving college as a reporter under
+Mercer, like Gleason, but, being blessed--if it was a blessing--with
+a small inherited income, had abandoned journalism for “letters,” and
+sought to create literature in a littered apartment down a side street
+not too far from his club and the magazine offices.
+
+When Mercer had broached to him the idea of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-
+Yule-Tide Association, he had fallen in eagerly with the scheme.
+
+“Fine!” he cried. “I loathe Christmas. The club is always so desolate
+on that day, and the service so bad! Every year you have to subscribe
+to an employees’ Christmas fund, and then when the day arrives half
+the employees are missing and the rest act as if they wish they were.
+There’s nobody to dine with. You have to sit at the general table,
+with men you don’t know, and every last one of ’em eats as if his food
+choked him. It’s worse than Sundays in August. Besides, I’ve got an
+aunt in Somerville, Mass., who always sends me a present! You bet I’m
+for the association!”
+
+The other four members had been carefully selected from a host of
+possible candidates, each one on the basis of his genuine contempt for
+this particular holiday. Gilsey had declared that he, personally, would
+support Christmas as soon as anybody he knew really gave Christianity
+a trial, but under the circumstances felt safe in taking out a life
+membership. So the new association was assembled, and held its first
+dinner on Christmas Eve, whereat plans for the next summer’s vacation
+were discussed. The dinner was followed the ensuing year by a second,
+and again by a third, for there had been no defections from the
+ranks. They seemed, indeed, matrimonially and Christmas-spiritually
+impregnable. December of the fourth year had come, and with it a
+snowstorm. Wallace Miller still lived in his littered apartment, down a
+side street, a little more prosperous than of old, but even more wedded
+to his habits.
+
+He was digging in the bottom drawer of an old secretary one afternoon,
+hunting for a long-buried manuscript (after the fashion of authors),
+when he came upon a bundle of ancient souvenirs, dusty and forgotten.
+Dropping all other tasks, as one will when suddenly confronted by
+visible tokens of one’s past, he untied the parcel and began going
+through it. It was a motley collection--the program of his preparatory
+school Class Day exercises; the class prophecy he had read on that
+occasion, full of names many of which he could not now connect with the
+forgotten faces; a dance card, equally full of disembodied initials;
+a photograph of the old, square house amid its apple trees where
+he had lived as a boy, and which he tenderly laid aside; another
+photograph of a face between parted strands of heavy hair, a face once
+loved with the chivalric passion of seventeen. Wallace looked at this
+picture a long time, as the memories crowded back upon him, and laid
+it back with a wistful smile. Then he resumed his inspection of the
+package. Next came a blank book full of quotations copied in a boyish
+hand--and mostly sentimental--and another blank book labeled “story
+plots.” He remembered that one; it was compiled when he was “trying
+for” the preparatory school literary monthly. The plots were amusingly
+melodramatic. Below these books came souvenirs of still earlier years,
+which must have been saved by his mother--childish compositions, a
+letter he had written home when he went on his first visit without his
+parents, and finally a big Christmas card.
+
+As he turned this card to the light, to see it better, a sudden wave
+of memories swept in over the threshold of his consciousness and he
+sat quite still while they had their way with him. The card, in color,
+depicted a small boy in a long nightie standing before a big fireplace
+with his hands stretched to the blaze. The warm red glow of the fire
+illumined his face and nightie. From the mantle hung a stocking. Behind
+him was a window, with small leaded panes, and through this window you
+saw a church roof, white with snow, and a cold moon riding high. Below
+the picture, in Old English type, were the words
+
+  Merry Christmas
+
+Long, long ago, in the forgotten, dim years of childhood, he had loved
+that card. Once, he recalled, he had taken it to bed with him. The cold
+moonlight in contrast to the warm red fire had fascinated him, and the
+great, wallowing flames, and the jolly stocking. Dimly there came back
+to him the awareness of white roofs visible from his own window in the
+moonlight, of his own stocking hung up, of wallowing flames and his
+father’s big, hearty voice, and a Christmas tree in the morning, with a
+red sled under the branches and a star on the top.
+
+He sat on the floor with the card in his lap, still and silent. Outside
+the snow was falling steadily. It was growing dim in the room. The
+steam pounded suddenly in the radiator. Wallace looked up angrily.
+The place was certainly gloomy, lonely, oppressive. He put the card
+hastily back into the package, slammed the drawer shut, and set off
+for his club, without lighting the lamps. Outside, the streets were
+already sloppy with the snow, and horses were falling down. Wallace
+vaguely recalled his boyhood delight in the first snow fall, his dash
+out into the drifts, upturning his face to meet the soft sting of the
+descending flakes. He turned his face up now, and snow went down his
+collar. He looked down again, and saw that the bottoms of his newly
+pressed trousers were getting draggled. Stepping off the curb into an
+apparently firm drift, he sank ankle deep in gutter slosh. He swore
+crossly to himself, as he stamped and shook the snow from his feet and
+garments and entered his club.
+
+It was that hour preceding dinner when the club was full. Young men
+like himself were sitting in groups in the grill room, their hats
+tipped back on their heads, canes across their laps, highball glasses
+before them. He could hear confused scraps of their conversation--“...
+took a tumble today, all right. If it goes much lower it’ll wipe out
+my margins”; “--you bet, it’s some show, and that girl on ...”; “--no,
+you should have made it no trumps.” In corners men were absorbed in
+the asinine game of dominos. Wallace suddenly reflected that the amount
+of domino playing which goes on in New York clubs is a good argument
+for woman’s suffrage. Several men hailed him with the usual “What’s
+yours?” but he passed them by and went up to the squash courts. There,
+at least, men were getting exercise, he thought. The courts were full,
+so that he could not play. They smelled sweaty and stale. He went back
+downstairs, and found Smith and Stedman, just up from downtown, joining
+them in the inevitable cocktail.
+
+“About time we began to plan our To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide
+feast, isn’t it?” Stedman asked. “I noticed today that all the shops
+were crowded, and a poor gink in our office showed me a ring he’s had
+to buy for his wife. The silly season is upon us.”
+
+“I suppose it is,” said Wallace, suddenly reminded of their
+association. “Hope I sha’n’t be out of town for Christmas.”
+
+“What’s that?” cried the others.
+
+Wallace was rather surprised himself at his words, for he hadn’t the
+slightest intention till that moment of being out of town. But the card
+had made him unconsciously long for Christmas, for a real Christmas
+such as his childhood knew.
+
+“I might be taking a trip soon,” he replied. “I’m a bit stale on the
+town.”
+
+“Nonsense,” said Smith. “You’re the most confirmed New Yorker of the
+bunch. You’ll be here. Where on earth could you go?”
+
+Wallace made no reply. He didn’t know where he could go, to find
+a welcome, and the thought somehow hurt him. They went out to the
+dining room and consumed the usual dinner, every item of which could
+be predicted. After dinner they went to the theatre, to a new musical
+comedy every song and dance and joke of which could be predicted with
+equal certainty. Then Wallace went home to his apartment, after the
+usual half hour at the club for a nightcap. It was cold and dismal
+in the apartment. “Also as usual,” he suddenly reflected. The next
+morning it was still dismal. Rather than work, he went out into the
+streets, through Madison Square which showed some traces of yesterday’s
+snow, and up the Avenue. The shops were gay. A toy store window
+attracted him. He saw many children going inside, with radiant faces of
+expectancy. One of them smiled at him.
+
+“I’d like to give somebody something,” he suddenly thought. “It would
+seem rather nice.” He walked on. The pavements and walks were sloppy,
+but all faces were cheerful. Christmas seemed to be in the air. Wallace
+felt curiously aloof from the life about him, isolated, lonely. Why had
+he hated Christmas? Was it not, perhaps, just because he _was_ lonely,
+isolated? Was not the fault with him rather than Christmas? This was a
+disconcerting reflection. He put it away from him, and went to the club
+for lunch. Gilsey was there, holding forth “agin the government,” as
+the old phrase had it.
+
+“Christmas!” he was saying. “Christmas is now degenerated into a season
+when most people have to study out how they can afford to give useless
+presents to all the people who have given useless presents to them.
+They can’t afford it, but they do it. Getting generous by calendar is
+almost as spontaneous as kissing your wife--if you’re so unfortunate as
+to have one--by the clock. It’s ...”
+
+“It’s something rather nice, as I remember it,” Wallace interrupted.
+
+“What?” roared Gilsey. “_Et tu?_ You’d better consult a doctor!”
+
+“Gilsey,” the other answered, “did you ever try the band wagon instead
+of the scorner’s seat on the brownstone steps?”
+
+Gilsey looked at his friend with a comical expression of quite genuine
+grief. “I--I don’t know what you mean, Wallie,” he said.
+
+“Never mind,” said the other, contritely, “doubtless I don’t mean
+anything. I’ve been a bit upset by a memoir of my dead life, that’s
+all.”
+
+But after lunch he returned to his apartment and took the memoir from
+the drawer again, looking tenderly at the little chap in the fire-lit
+nightie. “My dead life--yes,” he reflected, sentimentally touched by
+the memories. “That Christmas spirit of those days, can it not be found
+again? Is one foolishly seeking a lost Eden to search for it? Moonlight
+on a white world, a Christmas tree, the merry screams of children--of
+children--”
+
+His reflections trailed off into incoherence, and chiefly he was
+aware of an oppressive sense of loneliness. The thought of his
+club bored him. Gilsey, with his eternal knocking, bored him, the
+To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association struck him as rather a
+farce, not to say a pose. He wanted Christmas, that was the size of it.
+He wanted something he did not possess and in his present surroundings
+could not possess. He was living outside of Christmas.
+
+“I’m a sort of a man without a country,” he suddenly thought. “Gilsey,
+Smith, Gleason--we all are. We are single men in New York. I’m going to
+find Christmas! I’m going to find moonlight on white roofs! I’m going
+to find that kid in the white nightie!”
+
+He rose abruptly, and began to pack his bag and steamer trunk. He had
+no idea where he was going, but he was very cheerful. He felt like
+whistling, and found himself whistling a long-forgotten tune which his
+father had sung to him twenty years before. It was the ancient carol of
+Good King Wenceslaus.
+
+That evening he did not go to the club to dine. The next morning,
+early, he was at the Grand Central Station, where he selected various
+time tables and hotel guides, and retired with them to the waiting
+room. He might have gone to the town of his birth and childhood, but
+for many reasons he did not care to. A trolley, he knew, ran past the
+big house where he had lived. Perhaps the house no longer stood there!
+The spawn of the city had by now reached the village; it would be no
+longer country, but suburb. He did not want a suburb. Neither did he
+desire to hazard enjoying Christmas in the shouts of children whose
+mother’s picture now reposed in his dusty drawer amid the souvenirs
+of his buried youth. So he ran through lists of stations till his eye
+chanced upon North Topsville, Massachusetts. The name pleased him.
+There was a South Topsville also, though Topsville itself did not exist
+so far as the railroad was concerned. South anything, he reflected,
+is usually the part of the community which has the mills and motion
+picture theatre--just why nobody has satisfactorily explained; so he
+cast his lot with North Topsville, and purchased a ticket for that
+place. An hour later he was sitting in a Pullman car and leaving New
+Rochelle behind.
+
+By the time the train was well up into the New England hills, it had
+begun to snow again. Wallace looked out of the car window fascinated by
+the panorama of reddish gray hillsides seen through the white storm. As
+station after station was passed, each taking its quota of passengers
+from the train, each passenger met on the platform by welcoming friends
+or relatives, the Pullman began to be almost empty. Wallace felt
+lonely. There would be nobody to welcome _him_ at North Topsville. He
+felt rather sorry he had come when he reflected on this. After all,
+his search was probably hopeless. He ate luncheon, and became more
+cheerful, for the train was passing out of the storm into a glittering,
+white world of broad valleys and lovely hills and snug farmhouses on
+the roads between tidy New England villages where beautiful naked elms
+arched the streets. At South Topsville, sure enough, there was a big
+mill, and down the street from the station a motion picture theatre.
+Wallace grinned at the correctness of his intuition (“Almost feminine!”
+he thought), and began to put on his coat. The train ran into snowy
+meadows, into a strip of woodland and swamp, and then emerged into a
+gentle intervale where graceful vase elms fringed a stream, and came
+to a stop at the North Topsville station. Wallace alighted--the only
+passenger to do so--and the train moved on. He stood with his grip
+beside him and looked about. The station was a small one. Beyond it a
+road stretched across the meadow to the village street, where he saw a
+white steeple. On the other side of the tracks lay a snowy field, then
+a road with two or three farmhouses upon it, then the steep wall of a
+mountain. The station agent was up the platform examining his trunk.
+Beside the platform stood a pung of ancient vintage, and in it was
+seated a young man swinging his arms against his chest for warmth.
+
+Wallace took a step toward him, and the youth nodded. “Be you goin’ ter
+the hotel?” he said.
+
+“I am if there is one, and you are,” Wallace answered.
+
+“I be ef you be,” the youth replied, “and there is. Hev ter come back
+agin fer the trunk,” he added. “Most folks as come here in winter is
+drummers, an’ they travel light--sample case an’ tooth brush an’ a copy
+of the Saturday Evenin’ Post. What’s your line?”
+
+“Christmas,” Wallace answered with a laugh, as the pung moved across
+the meadows in the cold, crisp country air.
+
+“Wall, I reckon now’s the time ter sell that,” the young man answered
+imperturbably. “Quite a brisk demand fer it these days. My little gel,
+she’s writ a letter ter Santa Claus thet’s goin’ ter nigh bust him, I
+reckon, him bein’ me.”
+
+“Have you a little girl?” Wallace asked in surprise.
+
+“Gol, I got two of ’em, but t’other’s only six months, and ain’t very
+good at spellin’ yet,” the driver replied. “Why not? I bin married more
+’n five years. I’m twenty-six.”
+
+Wallace made no reply. He was thirty himself, and felt curiously
+ashamed.
+
+At the door of the Mansion House he gave the driver a dollar. “Keep
+the change--for the little girl,” he said. The other looked rather
+surprised, but finally put back his little bag of change into his
+pocket.
+
+“Wall, seein’ yer put it thet way, I will,” he said. “But I don’t jest
+like it.”
+
+“I _am_ a long way from New York!” thought Wallace, as he entered the
+hotel.
+
+The Mansion House of North Topsville was a relic of past generations.
+Large Doric pillars in front gave it an air of dignified antiquity; but
+the interior was surprisingly neat and clean, though darkened by the
+protecting portico. That it should remain open during the winter months
+surprised Wallace at first, but he learned later that most of the
+business visitors to the South Topsville mills stayed here, attracted
+by the superior accommodations and a rather famous kitchen, while a
+certain number of health seekers could always be relied on. He signed
+the register, and was escorted to his room, a large, old-fashioned
+chamber with a broken pediment, like a highboy top, over the door, and
+an open fireplace. He ordered a fire laid at once, and began to unpack
+his bag. Outside, on the village street, he could hear sleighbells
+jingling, and presently the shouts of children going home from school.
+As soon as his trunk had come, he put on a woollen cap which pulled
+down over the ears (purchased the day before in New York), and hastened
+out of doors.
+
+The village street was packed hard by the sleigh runners. There were
+half a dozen old-fashioned stores here in the town centre, a white
+church, a small stone library, a bank, a town hall. The town hall was
+built of brick, a simple rectangular block with white stone trimmings,
+and looked very cheerful over the snow. Out of the town centre, in
+either direction, the main street led beneath graceful arches of bare
+elm boughs into the white country. Wallace turned west, following a
+crowd of children with sleds and toboggans. For a quarter of a mile
+the street was lined with substantial old houses, several of them
+of considerable architectural beauty, and nearly all, apparently,
+surrounded in summer by lawns and gardens. North Topsville was
+evidently still a good specimen of a too rapidly disappearing type of
+aristocratic New England village. It seemed to the man as he walked
+along behind the children that he was less a stranger here than in New
+York. He felt as if he were coming back home. He walked with memories
+of his own childhood in such a town, and the intervening years faded
+from his consciousness. He half expected to meet somebody whom he
+should recognize, and once, indeed, seeing a girl’s figure coming down
+the path from a Doric porch behind guarding evergreens, his heart
+gave a startled bound, for it appeared to his excited imagination the
+figure of her whose picture he had so recently unearthed. Most people,
+probably, know that curious sensation of false recognition. If we have
+been thinking much of a person, we will often see him a score of times
+in a single day, ahead of us in the crowd, perhaps, or sitting across
+the theatre. At any rate, the shock of this sensation accounted for
+Wallace Miller’s pronounced stare at the girl’s face, when they met
+at her gate. Her eyes returned his gaze for a second, as if she, too,
+were appraising him, and then she passed quickly by, leaving behind on
+the keen winter air the faintest of perfumes, not the perfume which
+comes in bottles, but which comes from garments kept in lavender, from
+soap and health. The man drew a long breath, rather astonished at the
+acuteness of his nasal sense, long unused to subtler perfumes, and
+pleasurably warmed by the encounter. He looked sharply at the house
+from which the girl had come, to fix it in his memory. There were
+plants at several of the square, small-paned windows, and the tracks
+of a sled and toboggan all over the lawn. Behind it he could hear
+children screaming and laughing. He walked on more briskly.
+
+The road soon passed into more open country, and to the right was
+a long, smooth field, ending in a hill slope. Field and slope were
+alive with sleds and children, their shouts making a shrill, ceaseless
+chorus, almost like spring frogs. The man climbed through the fence and
+ascended the slope, attracting a few curious glances from the coasters,
+and stood at the top watching the sport. He felt ridiculously shy. He
+wanted to coast, he wanted to join in the sport, but he did not know
+how to begin. Nobody spoke to him. There was a group of red-cheeked
+high school girls there, but his coming caused no flutter nor
+whispering among them, as he knew it would had he been younger. This
+made him feel uncomfortably and unreasonably old. The smaller boys were
+paying no attention to anybody except themselves. The smaller girls
+were timidly coasting on a gentler incline of their own, and doing a
+great deal of the screaming. Two busy small boys were industriously
+hauling up a big toboggan, and bumping down on it over the runner
+tracks, hard put to keep it from swerving and upsetting them. Presently
+two other toboggans appeared, and had the same difficulty on the
+smooth, uncharted hillside.
+
+The man finally plucked up his courage, smiling to himself at his own
+embarrassment, and asked the evident owner of the first toboggan why he
+didn’t build a slide.
+
+“Dunno,” said that young person. “What’s a slide?”
+
+“You don’t know what a slide is?” exclaimed Wallace, glad to see that
+his scorn made an evident impression. “The only real way to get speed
+and distance out of a toboggan is to have a slide. You use up half your
+speed now by the friction of steering. All you’ve got to do is to make
+two banks of snow a couple of feet apart, and keep the sleds out. Then
+the chute between the banks will get almost glare ice, you won’t have
+to bother to steer, and you can go a mile a minute clear to the other
+end of the pasture.”
+
+“Gee, let’s build one, Joe,” exclaimed the second small boy.
+
+“Ain’t got no shovel,” said the first.
+
+“If you’ll bring shovels tomorrow afternoon, I’ll help you,” said
+Wallace.
+
+“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” the boy replied, with some scorn.
+
+“So it is, I forgot,” Wallace laughed. “Well, how about nine o’clock
+tomorrow morning, then?”
+
+“You’re on, Judge,” said Joe, easily, as he kicked the toboggan around
+to face down the slope. “Want to try a ride?”
+
+Wallace sat down on the cushionless toboggan, between the two boys,
+and with a yell of warning they started off. The additional weight
+in the centre made the task of steering too much for the helmsman.
+Two-thirds of the way down the toboggan began to pivot, skidded madly
+to the left, upset, and rolled all three riders over and over in the
+snow. They picked themselves up, laughing, while other coasters shouted
+and jeered. The man’s wrists and neck were full of snow. His nose was
+scratched by a piece of crust. His eyes were weeping. But he laughed as
+he rose. “That won’t happen when we get the slide,” he said.
+
+“Ho, that’s fun,” the owner of the toboggan answered. “Want to try it
+again?”
+
+“I think I’ll wait till morning,” said Wallace. “Good-bye till
+tomorrow.”
+
+“So long,” said the boys, turning from him at once, as if he no longer
+existed.
+
+He went back to the road, digging snow out of his neck and sleeves,
+and feeling rather sore and wrenched. In front of the house with the
+Doric porch he now observed a toboggan standing. The girl was nowhere
+visible, but the toboggan was a hopeful possibility! He went back to
+the hotel and unpacked his trunk while the early twilight came on and
+his wood fire sparkled cheerfully. He felt cheerful again himself now,
+and sleepy with the unaccustomed country air, and pleasantly tired and
+hungry. Supper was announced by a big bell clanged in the lower hall,
+and it was an excellent meal, with real maple syrup to pour on piping
+hot griddle cakes. Still sleepier and more contented, Wallace went back
+to his room to read, nodded over the pages in front of his fire, and
+finally decided to go to bed at the unheard-of hour of nine. After he
+had undressed and turned out the light, he suddenly became aware of
+moonlight outside. Going to the window, he saw it gleaming palely on
+the white roof of the church. The village street was still and almost
+deserted. The stores were closed. Save for a distant sleighbell, there
+was hardly a sound. He opened the window and sent his breath steaming
+out into the night, and then sucked back a great lungful of the sweet,
+stinging cold air. With a final glance at the white roof sleeping in
+the moonlight, he tumbled into bed, as the clock solemnly boomed nine,
+and almost before the last reverberation had died away into silence, he
+was asleep.
+
+He was awakened in the morning by the clangor of the breakfast bell,
+breaking strangely in upon his dreams, and for several moments he
+lay in bed enjoying the odd sensation of sunshine in his chamber and
+comparative quiet in the outside world. He heard sleighbells in the
+village street, and the voice of somebody saying “good mornin’” to
+somebody else, with the old Yankee nasal inflection, which was like
+forgotten music to his ear. At 8.30 he was through his breakfast, and
+set forth to find a snow shovel and a toboggan. There were plenty of
+shovels, but only one toboggan in the store.
+
+“Thet’s the last one,” said the storekeeper. “Kinder thought I warn’t
+goin’ ter sell it, seein’ it’s six dollars. The rest wuz three an’
+four. Would you like the cushion, too? Kinder absorbs the shocks!”
+
+Wallace took the cushion, too, and set out down the main street
+dragging his new purchase and feeling rather sheepish. Nobody, however,
+paid much attention to him. He looked for the girl at the house
+behind the evergreens, but she was not visible. The toboggan was still
+standing beside the Doric porch. He passed on, vaguely disappointed,
+and was soon at the hillside. His two friends of yesterday were already
+there, and with them six other small boys, with a total of four snow
+shovels. Evidently the word had gone forth that untoward events were
+on! Wallace was secretly pleased and rather flattered. He felt so shy
+with these boys that their response seemed to him a compliment.
+
+“Good morning!” he cried. “Well, you are ahead of time. I’ll bet you
+don’t get to school so early.”
+
+The boys grinned at this, looking at each other. Wallace felt more at
+ease.
+
+“Well,” he said, “let’s get busy right away. Let’s build the slide
+somewhere so it won’t interfere with the sleds. Over here a little to
+the left, eh?”
+
+The boys followed him to the left side of the slope, and under his
+direction they began to work.
+
+It did not take them long to raise banks nearly two feet high halfway
+down the hill, but before this much was completed a score of other
+coasters had arrived, and come over to watch the work. One large boy,
+with a sled, got into the incompleted slide and came whizzing down.
+
+“Hi, get out of that!” yelled the workers. “This is for toboggans.”
+
+“Aw, chase yourself, I’m goin’ down it again,” said the coaster, as he
+came back up the hill.
+
+“No, you’re not, is he, sir?” cried the workers.
+
+Thus appealed to, everybody looked at Wallace, including the large boy.
+
+That individual spoke up quickly. “I guess this hill’s as much mine as
+it is yours,” said he, with the characteristic aggressiveness of his
+type, “an’ I’ll coast where I please.”
+
+Wallace looked at him sharply. “You are considerable of a bully, aren’t
+you?” he said. “Well, I’m something of a bully myself. We’ve left all
+of this hill to sleds except just this narrow strip, which is going
+to be for toboggans. Everybody who’s decent will keep out of it with
+sleds. Anybody who isn’t decent, who’s just mean and nasty and selfish
+and not thoughtful for other people, will have me and all these eight
+boys to reckon with. Now, young man, go ahead and try to coast here, if
+you care to!”
+
+Wallace’s voice didn’t rise above a conversational key, but he looked
+the bully square in the eyes, and that individual slunk off to the
+other side of the hill. The smaller boys looked at the man with evident
+admiration, and began to talk excitedly.
+
+“Gee,” whispered Joe to Wallace, “Jim never got a lacin’ down like that
+before! I’ll bet he comes and spoils the slide tonight, though.”
+
+“When we get it done,” said the man, “we’ll offer to take him down it
+on a toboggan. That’s the way to pull his teeth. He’ll be ashamed then,
+maybe.”
+
+No sooner had he spoken, than something made him turn. Standing close
+behind him was the girl of yesterday. In the excitement, she had come
+up the hill without his seeing her. She was dressed in a white angora
+wool cap, a white angora sweater, and a short, heavy skirt, with heavy
+knee boots below it. She held a toboggan rope in her hand, and beside
+her stood a yellow-haired youngster of six, with cheeks like two ripe
+apples. She was looking at Wallace. He unconsciously smiled and half
+nodded as his gaze met hers. She spoke, rather to all the boys than to
+him.
+
+“That’s right,” she said, “you scorch Jim’s head with coals of fire and
+maybe it will do him good. Some of these boys are in my Sunday School
+class,” she added more directly to Wallace, “so I’ll just get a day
+ahead with the lesson!”
+
+The boys all laughed at this and Wallace said, “That’s right. _Carpe
+diem_, in a new sense!”
+
+Then he reluctantly turned back to the slide. Presently he saw the girl
+and her small charge tobogganing down the hills. He sent two of his
+own “gang,” as he called them, down the slide to see how it worked,
+and set the rest to completing the bottom part. It was soon done, and
+with a shout all the eight boys piled up to the top, crowded aboard the
+toboggans, and one after another went yelling down. After a few trips
+the bottom was packed smooth, and the coasters scooted clean across the
+pasture at the bottom to the very road.
+
+“Gee, this is great!” cried one of them.
+
+“You bet, best we ever had!” shouted another.
+
+Wallace looked along the hilltop and saw the girl. “Run and tell your
+teacher, Joe, that the slide is for everybody who has a toboggan,” he
+said. “Is that her son with her?”
+
+“Ho, she’s Miss Woodford. That’s her sister’s kid,” said Joe,
+scampering off, while Wallace felt a secret relief and a glow of
+pleasure.
+
+Joe returned with the girl and two other younger girls as well, who had
+a toboggan.
+
+“We built the slide for everybody,” said Wallace to Miss Woodford.
+“It’s for the toboggans, so they won’t have to be steered. The sides
+make it perfectly safe even for children. Try it.”
+
+“It’s very nice of you,” the girl smiled. “Our boys need a man to
+direct their play.”
+
+“I fear I’m a poor hand, and a very inexperienced one,” Wallace
+answered. “But I’m having a good time.”
+
+“Doubtless that is why the boys are,” she replied, as she tucked her
+skirts around her trim boot-legs, told her little nephew to hang on
+tight, and Wallace pushed them over the brim.
+
+The slide grew more and more slippery, and the fun more and more
+furious. Half the coasters came over to watch, or to beg for rides.
+Even Jim, the bully, cast envious eyes toward the slide. “Now’s a good
+time,” said Wallace, to a couple of boys. “Go over and offer Jim a
+ride.”
+
+“You do it, Joe,” said one of the boys.
+
+“No, you do it,” said Joe.
+
+“What’s the matter, are you afraid?” said the man. “You just show him
+once you’re not afraid of him, and he’ll come down off his high horse.”
+
+“Ho, I ain’t afraid!” cried Joe, going at once toward the bully.
+
+“Come on and try the slide on my toboggan, Jim,” the rest heard him
+saying.
+
+Jim scowled and hung back for a moment, but his curiosity got the
+better of him, and he came.
+
+“Take my toboggan, Joe,” said Wallace; “it’s bigger than yours.”
+
+Joe took it, Jim the bully and another boy and two girls piled on, and
+went screaming down the slide. The man smiled, and turned to meet the
+smile of Miss Woodford.
+
+“Won’t you try mine?” she said.
+
+He put her on the front, and held the small nephew between them. That
+young person was very solemn. Wallace could feel the muscles of his
+little arms tighten as he gripped the toboggan rails. His little face
+was set, his lips parted, his yellow hair blown about his temples from
+under his cap. He was deliciously frightened by the speed. As they came
+to rest at the bottom, however, he automatically relaxed, and let out a
+bottled-up yell.
+
+“Having a good time, son?” asked Wallace, as a small hand grasped the
+rope beside his arm.
+
+“My-name’s-Albert-Andrew-Goodwin,” the young person replied, all in one
+gasping breath. “I-think-this-slide’s-the-bestest-fun-I-ever-had.”
+
+Wallace laughed, and so did the girl.
+
+“My name is Wallace Miller and I quite agree with you,” he answered.
+
+“My name is Nora Woodford, and I’m not inclined to present a minority
+report,” the girl smiled.
+
+“What’s that, Auntie Nora, that thing you just said?” demanded Albert
+Andrew Goodwin.
+
+“It’s my way of saying the slide is lots of fun,” she replied.
+
+“Why don’t you just say it, then?” the boy asked.
+
+Again the grown-ups laughed, and Wallace felt a curious thrill through
+his glove as the little hand beside his on the toboggan rope pressed
+close against his fingers.
+
+At the top the small fellow took actual hold of his hand, with a most
+engaging smile, and demanded that he steer them down again. This time
+Albert sat at the front, and Wallace grasped the rails at either side
+of the girl, to hold her on, while she put protecting hands about her
+nephew. The slide was already like glass, and it was developing a few
+spots where the banks were not quite true and the toboggans were thrown
+from one side to the other. Two-thirds of the way down little Albert
+was whipped so sharply to the left that he let go of the rail. His
+aunt, with a scream, grabbed him hard, and the shift in her weight was
+more than Wallace could counteract at the speed they were traveling.
+The toboggan rode madly up the bank at an oblique angle and shot over
+on the other side, burying its nose in a drift and sending all three
+riders overboard in a complete header. Wallace was on his feet in a
+second, and had his arm about the girl, lifting her, for he saw that
+the child must be underneath.
+
+“Are you hurt?” he cried.
+
+“No, but Albert, quick!” she gasped.
+
+Nothing of Albert was visible save his legs. His head and body had
+completely disappeared. The legs were quite still, and something inside
+of Wallace went down to his boots with the sickening lurch of a badly
+run elevator. He put his hands through the snow, grasped the body, and
+lifted it up. It came up looking like a small snowman, wabbled in his
+grasp, straightened itself, and suddenly emitted a wail.
+
+“Oh, where are you hurt?” cried the girl, kneeling beside the child and
+dabbing the snow from his face and eyes.
+
+Albert blinked the water from his vision, meditatively lifted first one
+foot and then the other, stopped crying, and said, “Why, I ain’t!”
+
+The change was so comically sudden that both man and girl laughed in
+nervous relief.
+
+“Are you sure?” she urged.
+
+“Sure,” he replied stoutly. “Ho, that wa’n’t nothing!”
+
+Again Wallace helped the girl to her feet. “And you, are _you_ sure?”
+he asked solicitously.
+
+“I’m all right,” she said. “I had Albert to land on. You’re a fine
+cushion, Albert.”
+
+“And I had both of you,” Wallace laughed. “It was a case of the women
+and children first, with a vengeance! Let me brush you.”
+
+As he stooped to do so, all three were suddenly aware of how
+snow-bepowdered they were, and laughed again, while the others on the
+hill, who had gathered about, laughed with them.
+
+“Thank heaven we can laugh!” Wallace whispered. “When I saw those two
+little leggings so still in the snow I seemed to grow ten years older.”
+
+The girl looked into his face, and shuddered, without speaking. It was
+as though they had touched hands across a sudden gulf. He brushed the
+snow from her clothes as best he could, and then he spanked it off
+Albert, and on an impulse strange to him put his arms about the little
+fellow and gave him a hug. His eyes looked up to meet those of the
+girl, which were regarding him oddly.
+
+“I didn’t know before that I liked kids,” he said, as if in apology.
+
+“You do. I’m sure,” she smiled.
+
+Before any more toboggans were allowed on the slide, Wallace and his
+gang made the banks higher and straighter at the dangerous points,
+and thus corrected the chute held like a vise. The coasters were soon
+whizzing down again.
+
+But before they could start back, the town clock struck twelve.
+
+“Oh, gee, dinner time!” cried Joe. “I’d rather slide.”
+
+“The slide will be here this afternoon,” Wallace laughed. “You go home
+to dinner before your mother gets after you, Joe!”
+
+The rest grinned at Joe, and followed Wallace and Miss Woodford out of
+the field. It was a considerable procession which marched up the road.
+Little Albert refused his aunt’s hand, proudly insisting on tugging his
+own toboggan, and chattering of his adventure. Half a dozen small boys
+disputed for the right to drag Wallace’s. Another boy carried his snow
+shovel. Even the bully was in the group.
+
+The girl looked back, laughing. “I believe you are the Pied Piper,” she
+said.
+
+“If I should confess to you,” he answered, “that this morning I was
+afraid of these boys, as timid as a child before them, maybe you
+wouldn’t believe me. But I’m not used to kids.”
+
+She again darted an odd look of curiosity at him. “Are you visiting in
+town?” she asked.
+
+He shook his head. “I don’t know a soul here. I’m at the Mansion House.
+I just came--saw the name North Topsville on the time table and liked
+it. I’m hunting for Christmas.”
+
+Once more she looked at him. “That shouldn’t be hard to find. Christmas
+is nearly everywhere, isn’t it?”
+
+Wallace shook his head. “I’ve not met Christmas personally in a decade,
+at least,” he answered.
+
+The girl paused in front of the house amid the evergreens. “I think we
+can introduce it to you here,” she said, with a bright smile. “We keep
+quite a supply on hand in Topsville.”
+
+Then she nodded to him, and to the children, and turned up the path.
+The bully touched his cap.
+
+“Boys,” said Wallace, “don’t you know what to do when a lady meets you,
+or leaves you? What is it, Joe?”
+
+Joe turned red. “Touch yer cap,” he said.
+
+“Exactly,” said Wallace, “and Jim, here, was the only boy who did it.
+Good for you, Jim!”
+
+It was Jim’s turn to color--with pleasure as well as embarrassment.
+The other boys looked at him. The villain of the early morning had now
+become the hero! They scattered their several ways in some perplexity,
+while Wallace walked on to his dinner, every nerve tingling with the
+excitement of the morning, the unusual contact with small boys, the
+thrill of little Albert’s touch, his warm baby arms and hand, the
+sudden surge of horror at the thought of injury to him, the feeling of
+intimacy which followed the accident, the perfume of the girl’s hair,
+her bright, friendly smile, the whole atmosphere of naïve enjoyment. It
+wasn’t much like his mornings in New York, he reflected. And what an
+appetite he had!
+
+But he discovered after dinner that he was tired, that the muscles of
+his legs ached from climbing the hill, that his hands were chapped and
+his face smarted. Indolence stole over him, and he curled up before the
+fire in his room and read a book, until the light began to fail. Then
+he went out once more, into the cold twilight, and his feet led him
+up the street to the house with the Doric porch. He told himself that
+he must inquire if Albert were really unhurt. Almost at the gate he
+met Miss Woodford, Albert, and several of the boys, which answered his
+unspoken question.
+
+“Hi, where were you this after’?” called Joe. “Gee, the slide’s so
+slippery now it’s most ice!”
+
+“Yes, an’ I mos’ fell off again twice!” cried little Albert Andrew
+Goodwin, running up to him and thrusting a tiny hand into his.
+
+“Did you?” cried Wallace. “Well, now you see why you’ve got to hang on
+tight, all right.”
+
+The other boys moved on, and Joe led them in touching his cap to the
+girl.
+
+(“That’s right, Joe,” whispered Wallace, as the boy passed him.)
+
+Miss Woodford acknowledged the salute with a bright smile and a “Good
+night.” The little chap kept fast hold of Wallace’s hand.
+
+“I gotta snow man in the back yard. You come ’n see it,” he pleaded,
+tugging at his new friend’s fingers.
+
+Wallace laughed, a little embarrassed. “I guess not today, Albert,” he
+said. “It’s bedtime for little boys and snow men.”
+
+“Ho, snow men don’t go to bed at all, an’ I don’t go till seven!” cried
+Albert. “Please tell him to come, Auntie Nora.”
+
+“You’ve asked him, dear,” said Auntie Nora, with a smile. “I’m sure
+he’ll come for you if anybody.”
+
+Wallace looked at her, and her eyes met his for a second and did not
+tell him to refuse, so with Albert’s hand still tugging at his, he was
+taken up the path between the evergreens, around the big, square house,
+into a large garden space, where a snow man stood, with lumps of coal
+for eyes.
+
+“Why, how do you do, Mr. I. C. Snow!” cried Wallace, pretending to
+shake hands. “I am glad to see you looking so well. I trust you don’t
+find this weather too cold for you?”
+
+Albert shouted with glee. “Say it again!” he cried.
+
+Wallace put his ear to the snow man’s mouth, and shook his head
+gravely. “Oh, that’s very sad!” he said. “Very sad!”
+
+“What does he say?” Albert asked, crowding close.
+
+“He says he’s got such a cold from not wearing a hat that he’s lost his
+voice,” Wallace answered.
+
+The boy looked solemnly puzzled for a second, and then burst into
+shouts of laughter.
+
+“Ain’t he funny, Auntie Nora?” he demanded. “The snow man don’t really
+talk.”
+
+“_What?_” cried Wallace. “Well, I guess you never listened very close!”
+
+“I like you,” said Albert suddenly, grabbing his hand again. “Come in
+an’ see my blocks.”
+
+“Do,” added the girl, noting Wallace’s hesitancy; “we will have some
+tea.”
+
+“You are very kind,” Wallace answered, “but I’m afraid our little
+friend is forcing your hospitality.”
+
+“We always have tea at this time,” she smiled. Her eyes were friendly.
+In her white cap and sweater, her cheeks red with a day in the open,
+her hair curling out rebelliously about her temples, she was a
+temptation hard to resist. The warm little hand was tugging at his
+fingers. But Wallace managed to say, “Another time, sonny,” and made
+his way to the street.
+
+The next morning he debated the propriety of going to church. He had
+not gone to church for so many years that the idea was invested with
+novelty. Yet he knew that he was going in reality to see the girl
+again, and it seemed hardly an appropriate motive. However, he went!
+
+A farmer sat directly in front of him, with a sunburned neck like
+wrinkled leather, rising above a rubber collar. Wallace thought of
+his own grandfather, who had been a Yankee farmer, too. The whole
+congregation, and the bare meeting house with its gallery on three
+sides and its lofty pulpit reached by a winding stair, reminded him of
+his childhood. He saw Miss Woodford in the choir. She wore black furs,
+which became her as much as white. Presently she sang a solo, and her
+voice was sweet and quite evidently trained. Wallace found himself
+suddenly thrilled by it, as he used to be years ago by the voices of
+those he loved, and long after the congregation had rustled to silence
+and the minister had begun to preach, he sat with his eyes on the
+choir, in a delicious revery.
+
+When the sermon was over, and the congregation had sung the closing
+hymn and bowed for the benediction, there was an immediate outpouring
+from the pews and the hum of greetings. This was the social hour of the
+week. The minister came down from the pulpit, exchanging salutations.
+Children came running in on their way to Sunday School in the vestry.
+Neighbors chatted in groups. Before Wallace had fairly left his pew,
+a farmer in starched best was grasping him by the hand, and hoping
+he would come again. The minister came up and greeted him. A moment
+later he saw Miss Woodford drawing near. She put out her hand. “Good
+morning,” she said. Then, turning to the minister, she added, “Mr.
+Miller taught some of my boys in one day to do what I’ve not been able
+to teach them in a year--to touch their hats. I really think you ought
+to give him a Sunday School class.”
+
+“Good gracious!” gasped Wallace, with such evidently genuine amaze that
+the others laughed.
+
+“I should be delighted to get a man into the Sunday School,” said the
+minister. “Who knows, we might start up some Boy Scout work!”
+
+“Mr. Miller is just the man,” said the girl, with a twinkle.
+
+“I don’t think this is fair of you, Miss Woodford,” Wallace put
+in. “For all you know, I’m a heathen--maybe the Pied Piper, as you
+suggested.”
+
+“The Pied Piper would have made an excellent scout master,” the
+minister smiled. “Well, Mr. Miller, if you stay in North Topsville
+long, we shall hope to catch you yet.”
+
+He moved on, leaving the two young people together. A second woman,
+in black, drew near, a few years older than Miss Woodford. “May I
+introduce the mother of your friend Albert--my sister, Mrs. Goodwin,”
+said the girl.
+
+“I am always delighted to meet Albert’s friends,” the second smiled.
+“He tells me you wouldn’t come to see his blocks. I really think you
+will have to come if only to keep him quiet. For tea tomorrow, perhaps?”
+
+Wallace bowed, as Albert’s mother passed on. The girl turned toward the
+vestry. “Now to my class,” she said. “I do wish you would take it,
+instead.” Her eyes met his for a second, half twinkling, half earnest.
+
+He shook his head. “Really, I’m unfit. You don’t know.” He spoke
+seriously.
+
+Their eyes were together a second longer, unspoken questions passing
+between them, and then she left him. As he went down the path from the
+church he heard behind him the shrill piping of the Sunday School,
+singing the opening hymn, and he smiled at the sound, for it touched
+forgotten stops in his memory. Gilsey, he reflected, was just about
+getting up at this moment, after his Sunday morning loaf in bed, and
+was probably swearing at the hot water tap as he shaved himself. Smith
+and Stedman, maybe, were finishing breakfast at the club, and solemnly
+debating the tremendous question of how they would kill the remainder
+of the day. Mercer was getting ready the Sunday afternoon assignment
+book in a newspaper office stale with the tobacco smoke of the night
+before, and doubtless planning to get away early for a bridge game--his
+Sunday afternoon recreation. How they would all sneer at Wallace if
+they knew he was coming from church, and listening with wistful delight
+to the drone of Sunday School behind him!
+
+The following afternoon, when school was out, Wallace dragged his
+toboggan to the hill, and joined once more in the sport. The slide
+was still intact. The bully’s fangs had evidently been drawn. Miss
+Woodford was there, with Albert. For an hour Wallace’s toboggan was
+packed with shouting small boys, who treated him now like one of them,
+an unconscious flattery which he found very pleasant. Then, as the sun
+began to sink through a green sky into the tops of the hemlocks far
+across the snowy fields, Wallace left his toboggan behind, for Joe to
+take proud charge of, and walked home with the girl and Albert. The
+shouts died away behind them. It was almost twilight in the village
+street. As they came to Miss Woodford’s gate, Wallace saw a red lamp in
+the window, glowing between the evergreens. He paused abruptly.
+
+“I can’t tell you what a curious sensation that lighted window square
+gives me, gleaming behind the trees over the snow,” he said. “But in
+some strange way it takes me back to the days when I was no older
+than Albert, and Christmas was a reality. Ever since I came to North
+Topsville I’ve had a curious sensation of familiarity, though I was
+never here before in my life. Just now, if my mother should be waiting
+at the door, I’d not be surprised.”
+
+“Your mother is dead?” the girl asked.
+
+“And my father. I left New England many years ago, and I guess I’ve
+been a man without a country ever since. Now I’m coming back home.”
+
+It may be he spoke wistfully, for the girl did not reply for a moment,
+and little Albert ran ahead with the toboggan.
+
+“We New Englanders never quite forget, do we?” she finally said. “We
+are like the Irish in that. I--I trust you will continue to feel at
+home in North Topsville. We are surely New England here, especially in
+our ratio of the sexes! I’m one of sixty-seven old maids in this small
+village.”
+
+Wallace looked at her, with her firm body in its white sweater, her
+full-colored cheeks, her keen, dancing eyes, and suddenly laughed.
+“Then that’s proof positive of Mr. Shaw’s ‘Man and Superman’ theory,”
+he said, “and--well, some of you are merely indifferent.”
+
+The girl darted a look at him. “No woman ever tells what she really
+thinks of Mr. Shaw’s theory,” she replied, leading the way up the path.
+
+Presently Wallace was trying to drink tea and reproduce the Woolworth
+Tower in blocks at the same time, in a square, mahogany-furnished
+room which appeared to have been lived in for a century and yet to be
+freshly and cheerfully of today. He saw Miss Woodford for the first
+time without hat or wraps. She had run upstairs and returned with
+slippers on instead of high boots, and he noticed that her stockings
+were of heavy wool. Somehow he was pleased at this common-sense
+concession to the climate. Her hair was copious and rebellious.
+Inside of the house, she looked riotously healthy, in odd contrast
+to the women of New York. Her sister, evidently a recent widow, was
+more subdued, though she, too, had a twinkle in her eyes, a palpable
+inheritance from the white-haired woman who sat upright and energetic
+at the tea table and astounded Wallace by saying, “Since my daughter
+spoke of you I have read one of your stories in a magazine, and I
+don’t like it very much.”
+
+“Which one was it?” asked Wallace, looking up from the pile of blocks
+in front of him on the rug. His eyes met the old lady’s, and she seemed
+pleased at the challenge.
+
+“It was about a man and a woman--all magazine stories are--who have all
+kinds of emotions at a violin recital. It seemed rather turgid to me. I
+call that form of affection a sublimated species of Dutch courage.”
+
+Wallace joined in the laugh. “I guess you are right,” he said, “but
+you must try to excuse me as a New Yorker. You see, we live in such a
+restricted round of artificial pursuits and pleasures that we have to
+substitute art for nature as a stimulant.”
+
+“Speaking of stimulants, have some more tea,” said the old lady.
+“Albert, pass the gentleman’s cup.”
+
+“He ain’t got the tower did yet,” said the boy.
+
+“Albert!”
+
+Albert brought the cup.
+
+Presently Albert’s mother took him off, protesting, to his supper, and
+Wallace and the girl sat before the fire while the mother chatted on
+an amazing variety of topics, evidently pleased at the chance of a new
+listener, and asked innumerable questions about affairs of the hour,
+which the man answered as best he could.
+
+The girl came with him to the outer door.
+
+“I like your mother,” he said.
+
+“Most people do, who aren’t afraid of her,” she smiled.
+
+As he drew on his gloves, she stood in the doorway not minding the
+cold, and the last glimpse he had was of her face, rosy and smiling, in
+the slit of golden light, her eyes alone telling him good night, while
+the face of Albert was suddenly squeezed through between her skirts
+and the door frame and his small voice piped, “I got a steam train you
+ain’t saw!”
+
+“You _haven’t seen_,” Wallace heard faintly, as the door closed.
+
+Even the little shops in North Topsville were gay for Christmas.
+Nearly all had small evergreens before the doors, and attempted window
+displays. As Wallace walked back for supper, it occurred to him that
+he ought to buy Albert a present. But there seemed to be nothing quite
+satisfactory in the local market. It would be a good joke to write and
+ask one of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association to select
+it for him in New York. He smiled as he thought of Mercer’s remarks
+when the request came. What was the name of that Fifth Avenue toy shop,
+anyhow? Wallace searched his memory till the name came to him, and
+wrote at once for a toy aeroplane such as he had seen in the windows,
+the propeller operated by rubber bands. But he didn’t write to Mercer.
+He wanted to be sure of the toy.
+
+The next day it snowed, a soft, steady, dry fall, and after working
+all the morning before his cheerful fire, the ideas coming with
+unaccustomed fertility, Wallace set out for a tramp. He wondered if he
+dared ask the girl to go with him, and was still debating the point
+when he found himself on her porch. Yes, she would go; she loved to
+tramp in the snow. In three minutes she reappeared, wrapped in white
+woollens, and strode beside him down the path, while the wails of
+Albert were heard at being left behind.
+
+“Poor chap,” said Wallace, “it’s a great tragedy not to be allowed to
+do what the big folks are doing. Perhaps I can make him a snow lady to
+cheer him up when we get back. Where shall we walk?”
+
+“How would you like to take a tramp to Christmas?” the girl asked.
+
+“Have we time?” he smiled.
+
+She didn’t answer, but set off up the road at a swinging pace.
+
+“You see, the honor of the town is rather at stake,” she said
+presently. “We can’t let you get away still a heathen. We’ve _got_ to
+show you Christmas.”
+
+“Will we meet Santa Claus?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, no, not in the daytime, silly. But we may see the prints of his
+reindeers’ hoofs.”
+
+They turned up a side road after half a mile of brisk walking, passed
+one or two farmhouses, and began to climb a hill. The snow, which had
+been stinging their faces, was now abating. The wind had broken into
+the northwest, and in that quarter a rift of blue sky appeared.
+
+“Look,” cried the girl, “it is clearing! Oh, I’m going to show you
+something beautiful!”
+
+They now turned up a wood road, and began to make their way with
+difficulty through unbroken snow, four inches of feathery new fall on
+top, and beneath that the half-crusted old snow through which their
+feet broke. Wallace found it hard work, and looked at his companion
+solicitously. “Isn’t this too hard walking for you?” he asked.
+
+“Are you getting tired?” she smiled. “We really should have brought
+snowshoes, but you’ll have to go a considerable distance to fag me. I’m
+used to it.”
+
+“You are quite different from some women I’ve known in recent years,
+that’s a fact,” said he. “You are so wonderfully healthy!”
+
+“I’m disgustingly so,” she laughed. “Look! One of Santa’s reindeer!”
+
+She was on her knees in the snow, examining a hoof print. “And there
+are more!” she added. “See, he’s tramped around that sumach bush, and
+nibbled off all the buds!”
+
+“Are we getting near Christmas?” asked Wallace.
+
+She rose, shook her skirt, and started on. “We are,” she cried, “and
+here’s the sun to decorate the trees!”
+
+Sure enough, as she spoke the sun came out, and instantly the woods
+around them--a grove of young chestnuts and maples--became radiant
+with frostwork on every twig, arching into groins of tracery overhead.
+Wallace fairly gasped with delight, and the girl smiled into his face.
+
+“Have you anything as nice as that in New York?” she said. “This is all
+mine, too. I own this wood lot all myself.”
+
+She hurried him on through the sunlit, elfin aisles of the frost
+cathedral till suddenly the hard timber ended, and a grove of young
+spruce and hemlock confronted them, with now and then a patriarchal old
+pine lifting far above the lesser trees and holding out the dazzling
+snow on its branches against the blue sky.
+
+“Come in, come in,” the girl whispered, “Christmas is in here!”
+
+Close behind her, he followed in among the evergreens. The branches
+shook snow down upon them as they passed through till they were
+powdered white. A few chickadees hopped, half invisible, among the
+thick foliage. A moment later they stood in an open glade, where a few
+dead goldenrod stalks stood up in lovely Japanese simplicity above the
+white carpet, and all about them was a ring of perfect Christmas trees,
+each loaded with snow on its lateral branches, dazzling snow against
+the green in the afternoon sun. Above was the blue winter sky. Only the
+chickadees’ song broke the perfect silence.
+
+“This is where the Christmas trees live,” said the girl, softly. “Now,
+do you believe?”
+
+“I believe,” he answered. “And there is a present for me on every
+branch.”
+
+“What is that?”
+
+He looked into her face. “Perhaps I can’t tell you now,” he answered.
+“I shall have to take it home and open it. I’m not used to presents,
+and I can’t guess from the feel of the bundle.”
+
+“I hope it’s something nice,” she smiled.
+
+“I’m sure of that,” said he, his eyes still on hers.
+
+So they stood for an instant, their eyes meeting, and then her gaze
+dropped.
+
+They spoke more seriously as they tramped homeward.
+
+“Your mother’s criticism of my story, it was just--I see that now,”
+he said. “After all, to anyone who lives near woods like these, who
+has children to care for, and neighbors’ troubles to adjust, and the
+welfare of a community on his conscience, the life of some of us in
+New York, between theatres and concerts and clubs and teas, must seem
+rather--well, rather useless. I’ve thought sometimes--most of the time,
+I fear--that life outside of New York was a pretty dull and deadening
+thing, that I couldn’t be happy anywhere else. That’s the typical New
+York view. Yet all the while these woods were here, these elfin aisles
+of frost and twig--and--and you walking down them.”
+
+“I know the New York view very well,” she answered, after the briefest
+pause, in which his last personality seemed to hover between them till
+she put it from her, not angrily, still less coquettishly, but rather
+as an interruption to graver thought. “But if you lived here in North
+Topsville long you would learn that there is something to be said for
+New York, too. I should hate to live in New York all my days. I think I
+should rise up like Samson and push over the walls if I were cooped up
+in a flat. But you noticed how Mother just ate you up conversationally?
+Well, that was because you came from New York, I mean because you had
+touched all the currents of thought and activity just by being there
+amid so many active people. We have to go down to New York once in a
+while to restock our brains as well as our wardrobes. And you’ve no
+idea how good the old street looks when we come back!”
+
+“But here,” Wallace said, “you have neighbors, you have a community
+life, you are of use to other people. I suppose one could be in town,
+too, if he were big enough to realize the opportunities--to go out for
+them. But the average man in a city isn’t big enough.”
+
+“Of use to other people, yes,” she answered, eagerly. “That more than
+anything else is at the bottom of what silly little philosophy of life
+I, as a woman, am permitted to have. My friends in New York ask me, as
+they are rushing me off to a concert or a theatre or a tea, what I find
+to do with myself in the country all winter. I don’t tell them--what’s
+the use? But there’s so much to do! So much I’m not fitted to do,
+though I try. You know Joe, who helped you build the slide--the merry,
+red-haired little chap? You must like Joe! Joe’s father drinks. How are
+we going to keep Joe from drinking? We mustn’t let him go the same way,
+must we? That’s just one of a hundred problems--all too hard for me.
+Sometimes I come out here to these woods and just ask and ask for help!”
+
+Wallace looked into her flushed, eager face, lovely in its
+transfiguration of earnestness, and something in his own soul rose
+up and choked him. He saw his life as utter selfishness, and he was
+ashamed, ashamed as he had never been before.
+
+“I--I--came here looking for Christmas,” he said slowly, “but I guess
+it’s something different from what I thought. I guess I was just a
+sentimental searcher after my lost childhood. Christmas is--is service,
+isn’t it?”
+
+The girl looked at him, and suddenly put out her hand. He took it
+in his. “Yes, oh yes!” she answered. “It is service and the joy of
+service. It is just being glad of the chance! Oh, please always believe
+that!”
+
+She gave his hand an eager pressure, while her face glowed to his.
+
+“I promise,” he answered.
+
+Then her fingers slipped away, and they tramped on in silence, deep
+in their thoughts. The woods seemed more than ever to him a frost
+cathedral.
+
+Out on the open road, in the freedom of clear walking, they swung along
+at a faster pace, and laughter returned. They entered her house for
+tea, and once more Wallace saw her rebellious hair about her face, and
+once more the little hands of Albert grasped his, dragging him to see
+his toys, and sent a thrill to his heart, and once more he sat opposite
+to the girl in the firelight and talked, with the mother leading the
+conversation. He felt as if he were once more almost a part of a real
+family, as he had not been for many, many years. It was with a pang
+that he rose to go. The girl shook hands with him in the door. He could
+only say “Thank you,” awkwardly, and went to his hotel in a daze, like
+a man walking in new worlds not yet realized.
+
+The next morning he wrote to New York for a Boy Scout manual, and for
+more of his clothes and possessions. At dinner a message came from the
+girl asking him to join in a trip to the woods after a Christmas tree,
+and of course he went. At the Woodford house he found a big lumber
+sledge waiting, with Albert already dancing up and down beside the
+driver, and Joe, with three other boys, dangling their legs behind.
+The girl soon joined them, and they went jingling up the street, the
+youngsters chattering, and yelling at their companions on the walk.
+
+When they reached the grove of spruce and hemlock, everybody sprang
+from the sledge and began to prospect for trees.
+
+“Don’t let them cut any from the Christmas ring,” whispered Wallace.
+“I--I shouldn’t want that ring altered. Please!”
+
+The girl looked at him, and colored a little, nodding an affirmation.
+“You haven’t told me what the present was,” she whispered.
+
+“I will--some day,” he answered. “I can’t quite make it out myself yet.”
+
+For the next five minutes there was much scampering about and
+excitement and shouting. But presently each boy selected a tree, and
+Wallace, leading Albert by the hand, up to his tiny knees in snow,
+found a tree which just suited that young person, and then the ax went
+the round, and the sledge was loaded with the fragrant evergreens.
+
+On the homeward trip, Wallace was aware of the old Christmas tingle in
+his veins, for beside him the boys chattered of their holiday hopes,
+of sleds and books and tools and toys long desired; behind him was the
+pile of fragrant spruce; all about him was the white world and the
+cold air and the jingle of sleighbells. But he was aware of something
+else--strange and new, of which his memory had no record. He felt an
+odd, new tenderness toward these children; their chatter was music to
+him, yes, to him who lived between his club and his apartment and never
+saw a child from one month to the next! He put an arm about Albert to
+hold him on the sledge, and longed suddenly to press the little body
+hard against his side. He was aware, too, of the girl--above all of the
+girl; but not, somehow, apart from these other little lives and this
+new tenderness for childhood, but rather as the crown and completion of
+his mood. He thought of it first as his mood, and then mentally altered
+the word. No, it was not a mood. It was a new, spiritual attitude,
+surely. It was his present on the Christmas trees, the present _she_
+had given him. He longed to tell her of it. He looked at her, over the
+laughing, eager faces of the boys, and her eyes smiled back. He was too
+happy to speak. Perhaps she knew that, for she did not speak, either.
+When he took her hand to help her alight, it seemed to him as if they
+were older friends than when the ride began. An hour later, in the
+twilight dimness of her hall, she said to him:
+
+“Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Mother wants you to dine with us--early,
+because of Albert--and maybe you’ll help us set up the tree and
+decorate it. We’ll try to be as Christmasy as we can for you.”
+
+“Tomorrow I’ll--I’ll tell you what the present was,” he answered. “Ah,
+you’ve shown me Christmas already. I can’t explain--perhaps I shouldn’t
+say anything--but somehow I have felt today as if I had known you a
+long time, as if I had known you always, but something had separated
+us.” He laughed a little, embarrassed how to continue, for she was
+silent, her face averted. “I--guess that’s a pretty common way for a
+man to feel when he meets somebody who comes into his life with a big,
+glad, upsetting rush,” he went on. Then he finished lamely, “Rosetti
+has a poem about it, I recall.”
+
+There was a long silence. In the house behind Wallace could hear
+Albert’s voice, chattering excitedly to his mother as he ate his
+supper. In the sitting room he could hear the old lady poking the fire
+energetically--she did everything energetically. A big grandfather’s
+clock on the stair landing ticked in time to his heart throbs--a
+curious, irrelevant fact which his mind laid hold of as the mind will
+in such tense moments. Finally the girl spoke, her voice low, but her
+eyes looking frankly up into his.
+
+“What you have just said seems to connect me, a little more personally
+than I’m afraid I deserve, with Christmas,” she answered. “Isn’t it
+really little Albert you’ve known so long, not I?”
+
+“It is you--Auntie Nora,” he whispered back. “Oh, I can’t tell you
+now, but I will--I will! Why were all the intervening years?”
+
+“We are taught there is a reason for everything,” she smiled, her eyes
+veiled as a woman can veil her eyes when she chooses. But her color was
+high, nor did she move away from him. In the half dusk of the hall they
+were close together to see each other’s faces, and to hear each other’s
+low-spoken words. Her presence thrilled him. “Good night,” he suddenly
+whispered, taking her hand and holding it hard in his. “I shall find
+Christmas tomorrow!”
+
+“I--I hope so,” she whispered back.
+
+Her smile had gone, and the veil from her eyes. They seemed suddenly
+the eyes of all good women he was looking into. They gazed into his
+and told him in some mysterious way that a bond existed between him
+and her, that she desired his happiness, that she desired it to be the
+happiness which comes from the highest living. Her hand was warm in
+his. She did not withdraw it, but held his fingers firmly, while her
+eyes were lifted telling him these things the tongue cannot utter. His
+own eyes filled with strange tears, of happiness and humbleness, and he
+left her in silence.
+
+At his hotel room he found the big parcel containing Albert’s
+aeroplane, and also, in his mail, a final threat from the other members
+of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association. With a smile, he
+put the letter in his pocket, and, unpacking the aeroplane, consumed
+the half hour before dinner putting it together. When it was assembled,
+he placed it on his bed, contemplated it in the light of Albert’s
+emotions--and found it good.
+
+It was there on the bed when he came up from dinner--a child’s toy in
+his room, a warming reminder, a symbol. He drew a picture and wrote
+a poem to go with it, and then, seeing the moonlight on the village
+roofs, he went out into the street, his shoes squeaking on the packed
+snow in the zero weather, and swung up the road. In the house behind
+the evergreens the sitting-room window squares glowed warmly. Inside,
+by the fire or the lamp, she was sitting. Wallace two weeks before
+would have laughed down the suggestion that he could be such a banal
+idiot as to haunt the roadway before a woman’s house, thrilled by
+the thought that she was inside. Yet here he was, in the moonlight,
+gazing at the red window squares beyond the snowy evergreens, all his
+conscious being flooded with the memory of the girl within and the
+sense of home and hearth and loved ones.
+
+Home and hearth--those words began to chime in his brain. Losing them,
+one lost Christmas. Christmas was service, and the joy and celebration
+of service, she had said. But were not they, the home and hearth, at
+the beginning and the end of service? What was all the industrial
+struggle of the world for at the bottom but to gain them? What was
+liberty but the opportunity to enjoy them? What generous or holy
+impulse but owed its birth to them, where even the race is born? The
+light went out behind the evergreens, and a moment later reappeared
+in the second story. He saw a figure come to the window, look for a
+second, and then draw down the shade. It was she! That was her chamber!
+Foolishly, happily, tenderly, Wallace lifted his face toward it and
+shaped his lips into a kiss.
+
+As he went back to the hotel his life seemed as clear before him as the
+shadows of the tree trunks cast by the moonlight on the snow.
+
+Late the next afternoon, when he arrived at the house behind the
+evergreens, a large, mysterious parcel under his arm, Albert greeted
+him in the hall with shouts of delight, demanding to know if the parcel
+was for him.
+
+“For you? What an idea!” said Wallace. “I met Santa Claus just now
+flying over the church, and he dropped this down to me, telling me to
+give it to the best boy in North Topsville. You don’t get it unless you
+can prove you’re the best boy. My! I had a hard time catching it, for
+Santa was up nearly as high as the top of the steeple when he dropped
+it. Lucky I’m a ball player!”
+
+“I’m the bestest boy,” said Albert. “My mother said so yesterday to
+Mrs. Perkins, ’cause I heard her.”
+
+“What does Auntie Nora say? The law requires two witnesses, you know.”
+
+“Auntie Nora says it will depend on how Albert behaves tonight,” said a
+voice on the landing.
+
+Wallace looked up. The girl he had seen only in rough short skirt and
+outing woollens, with rebellious hair, was descending toward him in
+silks, a jeweled pendant at her bare throat, her shoulders gleaming.
+She was very beautiful, and the hand she extended toward him might, he
+thought, have been the hand of a princess which he should stoop and
+kiss.
+
+“Hi, Auntie Nora’s all dressed up!” cried Albert. “Why’d you all dress
+up, Auntie?”
+
+The princess blushed and laughed, and said, “Now Auntie Nora thinks
+you’re _not_ the best boy in town, because good boys don’t make
+personal remarks.”
+
+“But I think you’re very beautiful,” said Albert, suddenly throwing his
+arms about her. “Isn’t she, Mr. Miller?”
+
+“She is, indeed, Albert, she is the loveliest lady in the world!”
+Wallace answered, his voice intense, his eyes looking over Albert,
+fascinated.
+
+The girl hid her face on Albert’s shoulder, while that young person
+added the further comment, “Why, your cheek’s orful hot, Auntie.”
+
+“Now you’re the _worst_ boy in town,” she said, “and you won’t get
+Santa’s box, for certain!”
+
+“I’m not so sure,” said the man, as Albert freed himself from his aunt
+and rushed off with the box to the sitting room.
+
+The girl had scarce lifted her rosy face to Wallace, their eyes meeting
+in silence, when her mother and sister descended the stairs, and the
+cord was snapped. But it was at the girl’s side that Wallace entered
+the sitting room, and as they passed through the door together their
+hands brushed, and he knew that she, too, felt the spark.
+
+In the middle of the sitting room lay Albert’s tree, mingling its odor
+with the odor of burning apple wood. Albert was hovering about it.
+“How’s it going to stand up?” he demanded.
+
+“Maybe we’ll bore a hole in the floor,” Wallace suggested.
+
+Albert regarded him gravely. “No, I don’t think Grandmother would
+approve,” said he, lapsing as he sometimes did into a quaint adult
+vocabulary.
+
+“When I was little, we used a tub of furnace coal,” Wallace laughed.
+
+“Come on!” cried Albert. “I know where the tub is!”
+
+His mother grabbed his flying coat tails, and diverted him to the
+dining room. The excitement of dining with the family, of candles and
+turkey, of a big tinsel star suspended over the centre of the table,
+made him quite forget what he was about, and he was talking rapidly as
+he pulled up his chair.
+
+“Albert!” said his grandmother.
+
+The three women bowed their heads, and Wallace bowed his.
+
+Albert drew in his breath, expelled it in a grace, had just enough left
+for the “Amen,” and instantly resumed his interrupted chatter. The
+elders exchanged smiles, but Wallace was thinking how at that moment
+five members of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association were
+on their way toward Delmonico’s, and of what a contrast to this little
+act of old-fashioned devotion the preliminaries of that feast would be.
+He grinned to himself at the irony of it.
+
+Wallace’s attention during dinner was divided between the girl at his
+side and the boy opposite, between efforts to talk sense and nonsense,
+for Albert loved his nonsense, and demanded minute details of Santa
+Claus’s appearance as he drove over the church steeple, which he
+accepted with the paradoxically trustful unbelief of small boyhood.
+Wallace finally got into a considerable argument with the old lady
+regarding the number of reindeer in Santa’s team, she insisting that
+in her day, at any rate, there used to be twelve. In the excitement of
+the debate, the plum pudding was forgotten, and suddenly it appeared,
+burning merrily, and then everybody stopped talking to cheer.
+
+After dinner, Albert was permitted to stay up long enough to see
+the tree mounted. He went for a tub, while his aunt took Wallace
+to the cellar for a big hod of furnace coal. One must make all the
+preparations one’s self on Christmas Eve! She held her skirts high as
+they went laughing over the dusty, uncemented floor, and her silk-clad
+ankles shone in the dim light. In the far corners of the cellar dark
+shadows seemed to crouch and stir. She gave a mocking little shiver.
+
+“I used to be so terrified down here when I was a child!” she said. “I
+don’t remember whether it was rats or ghosts.”
+
+Wallace filled the hod, and on the way back from the bin stopped in
+front of the furnace.
+
+“I want to look into a furnace,” he said. “I haven’t been down in a
+cellar and looked into a furnace since I was a boy and had to do it
+every night and morning. It is so homey!”
+
+He opened the door, and the warm red glow came out and fell full on the
+girl’s face and bare shoulders, as she stood close beside him, peering
+in. He turned from the fire to look at her.
+
+“You _are_ so beautiful!” he whispered.
+
+“Sh--, you mustn’t,” she answered. But her color rose and her eyes
+softened.
+
+“I must, I must!” he exclaimed. “I cannot help it any longer! You are
+so beautiful, and so good! If I’d stayed in New York I should be at the
+dinner of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association. Now I’m
+gazing into Heaven with the most wonderful woman in the world!”
+
+“It doesn’t look exactly like Heaven,” she twinkled, pointing to the
+wallowing little spits of flame above the bed of coals, and moving a
+little from his side. “Come, we must go back!”
+
+He followed her reluctantly up the stairs, into the rear hallway.
+There, for a brief second, she faced him soberly.
+
+“I’m--I’m glad you are not at that horrid association you spoke of,”
+she whispered, and ran ahead swiftly into the sitting room.
+
+It was not long before the tree stood erect in the centre of the room,
+its top just bent against the ceiling; and poor Albert was ordered off
+to bed, refusing, however, to go unless Wallace carried him up on his
+shoulder and his aunt undressed him.
+
+“Auntie Nora lets me kick my shoes,” he explained.
+
+Wallace swung him up and marched up the stairs with him, Auntie Nora
+following behind. There was an open fire in the little chap’s nursery,
+and his stocking hung from the mantle. There were toys on the floor.
+When, a few moments later, he came dashing out from the bathroom in a
+long flannel nightie, followed by the girl, he ran to the fireplace and
+pinched the toe of the stocking. Then, instinctively, he held his hands
+out toward the blaze, and Wallace saw his Christmas card--saw the warm
+red firelight reflected on the little figure, the dangling stocking,
+the cold moonlight on a whitened world through the window beyond. He
+almost held his breath, whispering to the girl what it was that held
+him so in the picture.
+
+They stood side by side a moment, watching Albert, who was gazing in
+silence into the fire, his chatter suddenly stilled.
+
+“What are you thinking about, son?” said Wallace, presently.
+
+“I was thinking maybe Santa’d get his feet burnt if the fire didn’t go
+out,” Albert replied.
+
+“Well, you say good night to Mr. Miller now, and go to bed,” his aunt
+laughed, “and we’ll put it out.”
+
+The boy ran over and flung his arms about Wallace’s neck, giving him a
+soft, dabby kiss on the cheek. “Good night!” he cried. Then he dashed
+into his chamber.
+
+When the girl came back, she found Wallace standing in front of the
+fire, looking into the coals. She came over and stood beside him.
+
+“Come,” she said softly, “we must go down and decorate the tree.”
+
+He put out his hand and took hers, drawing her closer to his side.
+
+“That present,” he said, “I have not told you what it was. It was the
+gift of Christmas, it was the gift of a new spirit, it was the gift of
+my lost childhood--it was the gift of love.”
+
+She did not speak, but her hand lay warm in his, and her fingers closed
+a little tighter about his own.
+
+“When I suddenly saw my Christmas card right here in flesh and blood
+tonight,” he went on, “I was not surprised. It is but a symbol. Once
+I was the little boy on that card. Now I am my own father and mother
+looking at him. Last night I stood out there a long while before your
+windows, realizing that hearth and home are the altars of Christmas,
+alike its foundation and the flower of its spirit. I realized that,
+because love had entered my heart, because you had entered my heart. I
+have been so selfish these many years! I have not helped others, I have
+not liked children, I have been far away from all the deep, natural
+instincts. But you have brought me back. You have given me the present
+of a new spirit, the Christmas spirit.”
+
+“You were not really so selfish as you thought,” she whispered, “and
+you always loved children, only you didn’t have a chance to find it
+out. I knew that as soon as I saw you.”
+
+He put his arm about her waist and felt the perfume of her hair
+beneath his face, as her head rested on his shoulder.
+
+“It is so short a time,” he said, “and I am so unworthy. Why should you
+care for me?”
+
+“It has been a very long time,” she answered softly. “I am not a child.
+I have known the man whom I should love, and only waited for him till
+he came, and till he, too, knew. That is what those intervening years
+were for--that we might learn.”
+
+She lifted her face, then, and he bent down his head and kissed her,
+while his eyes closed with the wonder of it.
+
+“Auntie Nora, I want a drink of water,” came the voice of Albert
+suddenly. “What are you whispering about in there?”
+
+“Maybe we were talking to Santa,” she answered, as she slipped from her
+lover’s arms and ran to get the water.
+
+Hand in hand, they moved down the stairway, and her eyes flashed back
+at him like two pools of happiness as she went ahead through the
+sitting-room door.
+
+The three women and Wallace spent a gay and busy hour hanging the tree
+with tinsel and candles and stars and presents. When it was nearly
+finished, Nora disappeared. Presently she came back with a parcel.
+
+“This is for you, from Mother and Albert,” she said to the man. “You
+ask Santa to put it in your stocking tonight.”
+
+“Yes, and come tomorrow morning and let me see what I’ve given you!”
+chuckled the old lady.
+
+Both Albert’s mother and grandmother had bidden him a Merry Christmas
+and gone upstairs to tie up the presents hidden away from the prying
+eyes of the youngster, when Wallace rose to leave. The girl stood in
+front of him, between the glittering tree and the fireplace. The red
+glow threw her beautiful body into high relief. She put her hand into
+the bodice of her gown and drew out a tiny parcel.
+
+“This is something for your stocking, too,” she said, “not from Albert
+nor Mother.”
+
+He took it tenderly. “And I have nothing for you,” he answered, “for
+you who have given me everything--who have given me life anew!”
+
+“I have given you nothing which I haven’t received back again,” she
+whispered, suddenly coming into his arms.
+
+Her lips were close to his ear in the doorway. “Merry Christmas, dear,”
+they said.
+
+He kissed her hair. “Those words mean more than I can utter now,” he
+answered. “I--I’m not used to saying them so. Oh, may the Author of
+Christmas guard and keep you!”
+
+He went down the path between the evergreens, and the moonlight poured
+a soft, golden glory on the white world, which had never seemed to him
+so beautiful.
+
+He hung up his stocking when he reached the hotel, and put his two
+presents into it. When morning came, he sprang out of bed, shut the
+window, turned on the steam, grabbed his stocking, and climbed back
+under the covers. He opened the parcel from Albert and the old lady
+first, and drew forth a large barley sugar elephant, which he gave a
+slow, contemplative lick with his tongue, reviving memories of his
+childhood. Then he opened the other present, with fingers that bungled
+in their eagerness. It was a quaint and valuable old scarf pin, a ruby
+set in seed pearls, and wrapped around it was a tiny note.
+
+“This was my father’s. I have been keeping it for you, Dearest, on our
+first Christmas.”
+
+Wallace smoothed out the bit of paper and read it again and again,
+foolishly happy. Then he rose, beaming on the world in general,
+pinned an extravagant present for the chambermaid on his pillow, in
+an envelope labeled “Merry Christmas,” and went down to breakfast. As
+soon as the meal was over, he hastened out to the telegraph office,
+chuckling to himself, and sent five telegrams to the five members of
+the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association. He wished that he had
+thought to send them the night before, to the dinner. But it was not
+too late even now. The five telegrams were alike. They all read--
+
+  Merry Christmas!
+
+“You can have eight more words for your money,” said the operator.
+
+“I don’t need ’em,” he answered. “Those two will do the trick.” Then he
+hastened, almost running, up the street.
+
+Albert was already out in the front yard, pursuing his aeroplane over
+the snow, while the three women stood in the windows, watching him. He
+rushed at Wallace to give him a hug and a “Merry Christmas,” and then
+dashed back to wind up the propeller again. The door opened as Wallace
+stepped upon the porch, and in the hall he felt, like a man in a dream,
+two arms about his neck, and another “Merry Christmas” whispered in his
+ear.
+
+In the sitting room the old lady came forward to greet him, regarding
+his face sharply. She took his hand in one of hers, and put the other
+on his shoulder.
+
+“If my daughter hasn’t said it, I will say it for her,” she
+remarked--“this is so sudden! But I am too old a woman to be surprised
+at anything young folks will do. I believe you are a good man, for I
+have known many of both sorts and have never been fooled yet. Are you?”
+
+“Only negatively,” he answered, “till you showed me Christmas.”
+
+“Well, Christmas is a very good time to begin,” said the old lady.
+“Here is a present for you.”
+
+She brought him a token from the tree, while the younger women stood
+near him, the widow with her arm about Nora’s waist. He opened the
+package, and found within a beautiful old-fashioned watch fob, and a
+card, “From your new mother.” He knew instinctively that it had been
+her husband’s, and that its gift to him was a sacrifice not lightly
+made. In his eyes it linked him with the past, in hers it bound him
+with the future. He held this link of amethyst and gold in his hand,
+touched to silence, and then walked over and kissed the old lady on
+the cheek, while she patted his hair with a little laugh that was
+suddenly half a sob, and the two younger women watched the scene
+tenderly, the one with soft, happy laughter, the other in silence and
+with a furtive glance through the window toward her son.
+
+He felt a great, heart-warming, new instinct to protect and guard them
+all, to keep inviolate the gentle atmosphere of this old room, to watch
+over the little chap who was playing and shouting out there in the
+snow. The mother presently went to the rear of the house to attend to
+her housekeeping, and as Wallace and Nora sat talking softly before the
+fire, he was aware of the elder sister looking wistfully at them from
+her seat at the window, where she could also keep an eye on Albert.
+
+“This is only her second Christmas without John,” the girl whispered.
+“Poor Marion! I feel almost selfish today in my new happiness.”
+
+Wallace watched the other woman steal softly from the room, and he saw
+that she was clenching her handkerchief in her hand, and biting her
+under lip. When she had gone, Nora slipped to a footstool, her hands
+crossed over her knees. He laid his hand gently on her hair.
+
+“All the deep mysteries of love and death and sorrow seem opening to
+me on this Christmas morning,” he said. “I don’t quite know whether to
+laugh or to cry.”
+
+The girl raised her face to his, and her own eyes were misty now.
+
+“Poor, poor Marion!” she said. “Oh, now I know what she has lost!”
+
+Her hands suddenly clasped him hard, as if he were about to slip away.
+
+Just then the front door opened, and Albert dashed into the room.
+The girl did not rise. He came over to them as if there were nothing
+unusual in their attitude, crying that his aeroplane had stuck in a
+tree out of his reach.
+
+“We’ll get it in a minute,” said Wallace, drawing the boy to him. As he
+held the little body close against his side, he looked down again at
+the girl.
+
+“And now I know, also, what she has found,” he whispered.
+
+The girl’s eyes looked into his for a reply, and Albert, awed by the
+silence, gazed from one to the other without speaking a word.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
+
+
+  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
+
+  Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
+
+  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77821 ***
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+      The man who found Christmas | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
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+
+    </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77821 ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter hide"><img src="images/coversmall.jpg" width="450" alt=""></div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1><span class="antiqua">The Man Who Found<br>
+Christmas</span></h1></div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="bbox">
+<p class="ph1">Books By<br>
+<span class="antiqua">Walter Prichard Eaton</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">“The Idyl of Twin Fires”<br>
+  “In Berkshire Fields”<br>
+  “Green Fields and Upland Pastures”<br>
+  “Skyline Camps”<br>
+  “Penguin Persons and Peppermints”</p>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Copyrighted, 1927</i><br>
+  W. A. WILDE COMPANY<br>
+  <i>All rights reserved</i></p>
+
+<hr class="tiny">
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">The Man Who Found Christmas</span><br>
+  <br>
+  MADE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/frontispiece.jpg" alt="frontispiece"></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/titlepage.jpg" alt="titlepage"></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="titlepage">
+<p><span class="xxxlarge antiqua">The Man Who Found<br>
+Christmas</span></p>
+
+<p>By<br>
+<span class="xxlarge antiqua">Walter Prichard Eaton</span></p>
+
+<p>Frontispiece by<br>
+<span class="xlarge antiqua">Walter King Stone</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="antiqua"><span class="xlarge">W. A. Wilde Company</span><br>
+  Boston  <span class="gap"> ::</span> <span class="gap">  Massachusetts</span></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak"><span class="antiqua">The Man Who Found<br>
+Christmas</span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<div>
+  <img class="drop-cap" src="images/i_001.jpg" width="75" height="75" alt="A">
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="drop-cap">A</span> <span class="allsmcap">NEW GENERATION</span> has come into the world
+since what is here recorded took place.
+There has been a mighty war, when
+“peace on earth” seemed very far away.
+The automobile has conspired mightily to change
+our ways of life, possibly our ways of thinking and
+even feeling. You will find in this story, dear
+Reader, mention of forgotten things—sleighbells!
+We today, and especially our young people, are supposed
+to be more sceptical of sentiment than we were
+of old; so therefore we are presumably more sceptical
+of Christmas, which is the feast and holiday of sentiment.
+But unless this story grievously errs—and
+how can that be, since it took place as set forth just
+about twenty years ago?—young people have been
+sceptical of sentiment before; and if Christmas could
+prove them wrong then, perhaps it can again. If
+you and I can learn to drive a motor car, surely St.
+Nicholas can. Maybe the old world doesn’t change
+so much as we little, self-important mortals, proud
+each in our generation, fondly suppose. We may,
+as we elegantly phrase it, have “debunked” a lot of
+things since good Victoria went to her rest and Henry
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span>Ford and the Kaiser conspired against ours. But
+here is one bet still laid on Christmas!</p>
+
+<p>Life, of course, may not have been so lively
+twenty years ago. The life of a young bachelor in
+New York twenty years ago, at any rate, was humdrum
+and conventional. It was not popularly supposed
+to be, but it was. (It certainly isn’t popularly
+supposed to be today, but probably it is.) Wallace
+Miller was a young bachelor in New York, the New
+York when taxi cabs were a novelty and motion
+pictures cost a nickel, and the only unconventional
+thing in his life was the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide
+Association, which met every Christmas
+Eve, and dined. And, alas, even that dinner was
+conventional,—Delmonico’s and dress coats! His
+profane association numbered six members. There
+was Mercer, who had organized it and supplied the
+original profanity; he was city editor of a daily paper,
+and had to work on Christmas day, so perhaps may
+be forgiven. There was Jack Gleason, formerly one
+of Mercer’s reporters but now a playwright, who supplied
+most of the good spirits, which Mercer said was
+no wonder, since he had an income of $20,000 a year.
+There was Gilsey, a short, dark, thick-set, scowling
+man with an astonishing vocabulary of invective and
+all the instincts of a born iconoclast, who by day was
+sub-editor of a mild religious weekly. There were
+Smith and Stedman, brokers and club mates of
+Miller’s, who resembled closely their kind, even to
+the angle at which they pushed back their hats when
+sitting in the club before dinner. Finally there was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span>Wallace Miller himself, who had begun his New York
+career after leaving college as a reporter under
+Mercer, like Gleason, but, being blessed—if it was a
+blessing—with a small inherited income, had abandoned
+journalism for “letters,” and sought to create
+literature in a littered apartment down a side street
+not too far from his club and the magazine offices.</p>
+
+<p>When Mercer had broached to him the idea of the
+To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association, he
+had fallen in eagerly with the scheme.</p>
+
+<p>“Fine!” he cried. “I loathe Christmas. The
+club is always so desolate on that day, and the service
+so bad! Every year you have to subscribe to an employees’
+Christmas fund, and then when the day arrives
+half the employees are missing and the rest act
+as if they wish they were. There’s nobody to dine
+with. You have to sit at the general table, with men
+you don’t know, and every last one of ’em eats as if
+his food choked him. It’s worse than Sundays in
+August. Besides, I’ve got an aunt in Somerville,
+Mass., who always sends me a present! You bet I’m
+for the association!”</p>
+
+<p>The other four members had been carefully selected
+from a host of possible candidates, each one on
+the basis of his genuine contempt for this particular
+holiday. Gilsey had declared that he, personally,
+would support Christmas as soon as anybody he
+knew really gave Christianity a trial, but under the
+circumstances felt safe in taking out a life membership.
+So the new association was assembled, and
+held its first dinner on Christmas Eve, whereat plans
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>for the next summer’s vacation were discussed. The
+dinner was followed the ensuing year by a second,
+and again by a third, for there had been no defections
+from the ranks. They seemed, indeed, matrimonially
+and Christmas-spiritually impregnable. December
+of the fourth year had come, and with it a
+snowstorm. Wallace Miller still lived in his littered
+apartment, down a side street, a little more prosperous
+than of old, but even more wedded to his habits.</p>
+
+<p>He was digging in the bottom drawer of an old
+secretary one afternoon, hunting for a long-buried
+manuscript (after the fashion of authors), when he
+came upon a bundle of ancient souvenirs, dusty and
+forgotten. Dropping all other tasks, as one will
+when suddenly confronted by visible tokens of one’s
+past, he untied the parcel and began going through
+it. It was a motley collection—the program of his
+preparatory school Class Day exercises; the class
+prophecy he had read on that occasion, full of names
+many of which he could not now connect with the
+forgotten faces; a dance card, equally full of disembodied
+initials; a photograph of the old, square house
+amid its apple trees where he had lived as a boy, and
+which he tenderly laid aside; another photograph of a
+face between parted strands of heavy hair, a face once
+loved with the chivalric passion of seventeen. Wallace
+looked at this picture a long time, as the memories
+crowded back upon him, and laid it back with a
+wistful smile. Then he resumed his inspection of the
+package. Next came a blank book full of quotations
+copied in a boyish hand—and mostly sentimental—and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>another blank book labeled “story plots.” He
+remembered that one; it was compiled when he was
+“trying for” the preparatory school literary monthly.
+The plots were amusingly melodramatic. Below
+these books came souvenirs of still earlier years,
+which must have been saved by his mother—childish
+compositions, a letter he had written home when
+he went on his first visit without his parents, and
+finally a big Christmas card.</p>
+
+<p>As he turned this card to the light, to see it better,
+a sudden wave of memories swept in over the threshold
+of his consciousness and he sat quite still while
+they had their way with him. The card, in color, depicted
+a small boy in a long nightie standing before a
+big fireplace with his hands stretched to the blaze.
+The warm red glow of the fire illumined his face and
+nightie. From the mantle hung a stocking. Behind
+him was a window, with small leaded panes, and
+through this window you saw a church roof, white
+with snow, and a cold moon riding high. Below the
+picture, in Old English type, were the words</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><span class="large antiqua">Merry Christmas</span></p>
+
+
+<p>Long, long ago, in the forgotten, dim years of childhood,
+he had loved that card. Once, he recalled, he
+had taken it to bed with him. The cold moonlight
+in contrast to the warm red fire had fascinated him,
+and the great, wallowing flames, and the jolly stocking.
+Dimly there came back to him the awareness of
+white roofs visible from his own window in the moonlight,
+of his own stocking hung up, of wallowing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>flames and his father’s big, hearty voice, and a
+Christmas tree in the morning, with a red sled under
+the branches and a star on the top.</p>
+
+<p>He sat on the floor with the card in his lap, still
+and silent. Outside the snow was falling steadily.
+It was growing dim in the room. The steam pounded
+suddenly in the radiator. Wallace looked up angrily.
+The place was certainly gloomy, lonely, oppressive.
+He put the card hastily back into the package,
+slammed the drawer shut, and set off for his club,
+without lighting the lamps. Outside, the streets
+were already sloppy with the snow, and horses were
+falling down. Wallace vaguely recalled his boyhood
+delight in the first snow fall, his dash out into the
+drifts, upturning his face to meet the soft sting of the
+descending flakes. He turned his face up now, and
+snow went down his collar. He looked down again,
+and saw that the bottoms of his newly pressed trousers
+were getting draggled. Stepping off the curb into
+an apparently firm drift, he sank ankle deep in gutter
+slosh. He swore crossly to himself, as he stamped
+and shook the snow from his feet and garments and
+entered his club.</p>
+
+<p>It was that hour preceding dinner when the club
+was full. Young men like himself were sitting in
+groups in the grill room, their hats tipped back on their
+heads, canes across their laps, highball glasses before
+them. He could hear confused scraps of their conversation—“...
+took a tumble today, all right. If it
+goes much lower it’ll wipe out my margins”; “—you
+bet, it’s some show, and that girl on ...”; “—no,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>you should have made it no trumps.” In corners
+men were absorbed in the asinine game of dominos.
+Wallace suddenly reflected that the amount of domino
+playing which goes on in New York clubs is a good
+argument for woman’s suffrage. Several men hailed
+him with the usual “What’s yours?” but he passed
+them by and went up to the squash courts. There,
+at least, men were getting exercise, he thought. The
+courts were full, so that he could not play. They
+smelled sweaty and stale. He went back downstairs,
+and found Smith and Stedman, just up from
+downtown, joining them in the inevitable cocktail.</p>
+
+<p>“About time we began to plan our To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide
+feast, isn’t it?” Stedman asked.
+“I noticed today that all the shops were crowded,
+and a poor gink in our office showed me a ring he’s
+had to buy for his wife. The silly season is upon us.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose it is,” said Wallace, suddenly reminded
+of their association. “Hope I sha’n’t be out of town
+for Christmas.”</p>
+
+<p>“What’s that?” cried the others.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace was rather surprised himself at his words,
+for he hadn’t the slightest intention till that moment
+of being out of town. But the card had made him
+unconsciously long for Christmas, for a real Christmas
+such as his childhood knew.</p>
+
+<p>“I might be taking a trip soon,” he replied. “I’m
+a bit stale on the town.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nonsense,” said Smith. “You’re the most confirmed
+New Yorker of the bunch. You’ll be here.
+Where on earth could you go?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>Wallace made no reply. He didn’t know where he
+could go, to find a welcome, and the thought somehow
+hurt him. They went out to the dining room and
+consumed the usual dinner, every item of which could
+be predicted. After dinner they went to the theatre,
+to a new musical comedy every song and dance and
+joke of which could be predicted with equal certainty.
+Then Wallace went home to his apartment, after the
+usual half hour at the club for a nightcap. It was
+cold and dismal in the apartment. “Also as usual,” he
+suddenly reflected. The next morning it was still
+dismal. Rather than work, he went out into the
+streets, through Madison Square which showed some
+traces of yesterday’s snow, and up the Avenue. The
+shops were gay. A toy store window attracted him.
+He saw many children going inside, with radiant faces
+of expectancy. One of them smiled at him.</p>
+
+<p>“I’d like to give somebody something,” he suddenly
+thought. “It would seem rather nice.” He walked
+on. The pavements and walks were sloppy, but all
+faces were cheerful. Christmas seemed to be in the
+air. Wallace felt curiously aloof from the life about
+him, isolated, lonely. Why had he hated Christmas?
+Was it not, perhaps, just because he <i>was</i> lonely, isolated?
+Was not the fault with him rather than
+Christmas? This was a disconcerting reflection.
+He put it away from him, and went to the club for
+lunch. Gilsey was there, holding forth “agin the
+government,” as the old phrase had it.</p>
+
+<p>“Christmas!” he was saying. “Christmas is now
+degenerated into a season when most people have to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>study out how they can afford to give useless presents
+to all the people who have given useless presents to
+them. They can’t afford it, but they do it. Getting
+generous by calendar is almost as spontaneous as
+kissing your wife—if you’re so unfortunate as to
+have one—by the clock. It’s ...”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s something rather nice, as I remember it,”
+Wallace interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>“What?” roared Gilsey. “<i>Et tu?</i> You’d better
+consult a doctor!”</p>
+
+<p>“Gilsey,” the other answered, “did you ever try
+the band wagon instead of the scorner’s seat on the
+brownstone steps?”</p>
+
+<p>Gilsey looked at his friend with a comical expression
+of quite genuine grief. “I—I don’t know what you
+mean, Wallie,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Never mind,” said the other, contritely, “doubtless
+I don’t mean anything. I’ve been a bit upset by
+a memoir of my dead life, that’s all.”</p>
+
+<p>But after lunch he returned to his apartment and
+took the memoir from the drawer again, looking tenderly
+at the little chap in the fire-lit nightie. “My
+dead life—yes,” he reflected, sentimentally touched
+by the memories. “That Christmas spirit of those
+days, can it not be found again? Is one foolishly
+seeking a lost Eden to search for it? Moonlight on
+a white world, a Christmas tree, the merry screams of
+children—of children—”</p>
+
+<p>His reflections trailed off into incoherence, and
+chiefly he was aware of an oppressive sense of loneliness.
+The thought of his club bored him. Gilsey,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>with his eternal knocking, bored him, the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide
+Association struck him as
+rather a farce, not to say a pose. He wanted Christmas,
+that was the size of it. He wanted something
+he did not possess and in his present surroundings
+could not possess. He was living outside of Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m a sort of a man without a country,” he suddenly
+thought. “Gilsey, Smith, Gleason—we all
+are. We are single men in New York. I’m going
+to find Christmas! I’m going to find moonlight on
+white roofs! I’m going to find that kid in the white
+nightie!”</p>
+
+<p>He rose abruptly, and began to pack his bag and
+steamer trunk. He had no idea where he was going,
+but he was very cheerful. He felt like whistling, and
+found himself whistling a long-forgotten tune which
+his father had sung to him twenty years before. It
+was the ancient carol of Good King Wenceslaus.</p>
+
+<p>That evening he did not go to the club to dine.
+The next morning, early, he was at the Grand Central
+Station, where he selected various time tables and
+hotel guides, and retired with them to the waiting
+room. He might have gone to the town of his birth
+and childhood, but for many reasons he did not care
+to. A trolley, he knew, ran past the big house where
+he had lived. Perhaps the house no longer stood
+there! The spawn of the city had by now reached
+the village; it would be no longer country, but suburb.
+He did not want a suburb. Neither did he desire to
+hazard enjoying Christmas in the shouts of children
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>whose mother’s picture now reposed in his dusty
+drawer amid the souvenirs of his buried youth. So
+he ran through lists of stations till his eye chanced
+upon North Topsville, Massachusetts. The name
+pleased him. There was a South Topsville also,
+though Topsville itself did not exist so far as the railroad
+was concerned. South anything, he reflected,
+is usually the part of the community which has the
+mills and motion picture theatre—just why nobody
+has satisfactorily explained; so he cast his lot with
+North Topsville, and purchased a ticket for that
+place. An hour later he was sitting in a Pullman car
+and leaving New Rochelle behind.</p>
+
+<p>By the time the train was well up into the New
+England hills, it had begun to snow again. Wallace
+looked out of the car window fascinated by the panorama
+of reddish gray hillsides seen through the white
+storm. As station after station was passed, each
+taking its quota of passengers from the train, each
+passenger met on the platform by welcoming friends
+or relatives, the Pullman began to be almost empty.
+Wallace felt lonely. There would be nobody to welcome
+<i>him</i> at North Topsville. He felt rather sorry
+he had come when he reflected on this. After all, his
+search was probably hopeless. He ate luncheon, and
+became more cheerful, for the train was passing out
+of the storm into a glittering, white world of broad
+valleys and lovely hills and snug farmhouses on the
+roads between tidy New England villages where
+beautiful naked elms arched the streets. At South
+Topsville, sure enough, there was a big mill, and down
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>the street from the station a motion picture theatre.
+Wallace grinned at the correctness of his intuition
+(“Almost feminine!” he thought), and began to put
+on his coat. The train ran into snowy meadows,
+into a strip of woodland and swamp, and then emerged
+into a gentle intervale where graceful vase elms
+fringed a stream, and came to a stop at the North
+Topsville station. Wallace alighted—the only passenger
+to do so—and the train moved on. He stood
+with his grip beside him and looked about. The
+station was a small one. Beyond it a road stretched
+across the meadow to the village street, where
+he saw a white steeple. On the other side of the
+tracks lay a snowy field, then a road with two or
+three farmhouses upon it, then the steep wall of
+a mountain. The station agent was up the platform
+examining his trunk. Beside the platform stood a
+pung of ancient vintage, and in it was seated a
+young man swinging his arms against his chest for
+warmth.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace took a step toward him, and the youth
+nodded. “Be you goin’ ter the hotel?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“I am if there is one, and you are,” Wallace
+answered.</p>
+
+<p>“I be ef you be,” the youth replied, “and there is.
+Hev ter come back agin fer the trunk,” he added.
+“Most folks as come here in winter is drummers, an’
+they travel light—sample case an’ tooth brush an’ a
+copy of the Saturday Evenin’ Post. What’s your
+line?”</p>
+
+<p>“Christmas,” Wallace answered with a laugh, as
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>the pung moved across the meadows in the cold, crisp
+country air.</p>
+
+<p>“Wall, I reckon now’s the time ter sell that,” the
+young man answered imperturbably. “Quite a brisk
+demand fer it these days. My little gel, she’s writ a
+letter ter Santa Claus thet’s goin’ ter nigh bust him,
+I reckon, him bein’ me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Have you a little girl?” Wallace asked in surprise.</p>
+
+<p>“Gol, I got two of ’em, but t’other’s only six
+months, and ain’t very good at spellin’ yet,” the
+driver replied. “Why not? I bin married more ’n
+five years. I’m twenty-six.”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace made no reply. He was thirty himself,
+and felt curiously ashamed.</p>
+
+<p>At the door of the Mansion House he gave the
+driver a dollar. “Keep the change—for the little
+girl,” he said. The other looked rather surprised,
+but finally put back his little bag of change into his
+pocket.</p>
+
+<p>“Wall, seein’ yer put it thet way, I will,” he said.
+“But I don’t jest like it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I <i>am</i> a long way from New York!” thought
+Wallace, as he entered the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>The Mansion House of North Topsville was a relic
+of past generations. Large Doric pillars in front
+gave it an air of dignified antiquity; but the interior
+was surprisingly neat and clean, though darkened by
+the protecting portico. That it should remain open
+during the winter months surprised Wallace at first,
+but he learned later that most of the business visitors
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>to the South Topsville mills stayed here, attracted
+by the superior accommodations and a rather famous
+kitchen, while a certain number of health seekers
+could always be relied on. He signed the register,
+and was escorted to his room, a large, old-fashioned
+chamber with a broken pediment, like a highboy top,
+over the door, and an open fireplace. He ordered a
+fire laid at once, and began to unpack his bag. Outside,
+on the village street, he could hear sleighbells
+jingling, and presently the shouts of children going
+home from school. As soon as his trunk had come,
+he put on a woollen cap which pulled down over the
+ears (purchased the day before in New York), and
+hastened out of doors.</p>
+
+<p>The village street was packed hard by the sleigh
+runners. There were half a dozen old-fashioned
+stores here in the town centre, a white church, a
+small stone library, a bank, a town hall. The town
+hall was built of brick, a simple rectangular block with
+white stone trimmings, and looked very cheerful over
+the snow. Out of the town centre, in either direction,
+the main street led beneath graceful arches of
+bare elm boughs into the white country. Wallace
+turned west, following a crowd of children with sleds
+and toboggans. For a quarter of a mile the street
+was lined with substantial old houses, several of them
+of considerable architectural beauty, and nearly all,
+apparently, surrounded in summer by lawns and gardens.
+North Topsville was evidently still a good
+specimen of a too rapidly disappearing type of aristocratic
+New England village. It seemed to the man
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>as he walked along behind the children that he was
+less a stranger here than in New York. He felt as
+if he were coming back home. He walked with
+memories of his own childhood in such a town, and
+the intervening years faded from his consciousness.
+He half expected to meet somebody whom he should
+recognize, and once, indeed, seeing a girl’s figure coming
+down the path from a Doric porch behind guarding
+evergreens, his heart gave a startled bound, for it
+appeared to his excited imagination the figure of her
+whose picture he had so recently unearthed. Most
+people, probably, know that curious sensation of false
+recognition. If we have been thinking much of a
+person, we will often see him a score of times in a
+single day, ahead of us in the crowd, perhaps, or sitting
+across the theatre. At any rate, the shock of
+this sensation accounted for Wallace Miller’s pronounced
+stare at the girl’s face, when they met at her
+gate. Her eyes returned his gaze for a second, as if
+she, too, were appraising him, and then she passed
+quickly by, leaving behind on the keen winter air
+the faintest of perfumes, not the perfume which
+comes in bottles, but which comes from garments
+kept in lavender, from soap and health. The man
+drew a long breath, rather astonished at the acuteness
+of his nasal sense, long unused to subtler perfumes,
+and pleasurably warmed by the encounter.
+He looked sharply at the house from which the girl
+had come, to fix it in his memory. There were plants
+at several of the square, small-paned windows, and
+the tracks of a sled and toboggan all over the lawn.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>Behind it he could hear children screaming and
+laughing. He walked on more briskly.</p>
+
+<p>The road soon passed into more open country, and
+to the right was a long, smooth field, ending in a hill
+slope. Field and slope were alive with sleds and
+children, their shouts making a shrill, ceaseless
+chorus, almost like spring frogs. The man climbed
+through the fence and ascended the slope, attracting
+a few curious glances from the coasters, and stood at
+the top watching the sport. He felt ridiculously shy.
+He wanted to coast, he wanted to join in the sport,
+but he did not know how to begin. Nobody spoke to
+him. There was a group of red-cheeked high school
+girls there, but his coming caused no flutter nor whispering
+among them, as he knew it would had he been
+younger. This made him feel uncomfortably and
+unreasonably old. The smaller boys were paying no
+attention to anybody except themselves. The smaller
+girls were timidly coasting on a gentler incline of
+their own, and doing a great deal of the screaming.
+Two busy small boys were industriously hauling up
+a big toboggan, and bumping down on it over the
+runner tracks, hard put to keep it from swerving and
+upsetting them. Presently two other toboggans appeared,
+and had the same difficulty on the smooth,
+uncharted hillside.</p>
+
+<p>The man finally plucked up his courage, smiling to
+himself at his own embarrassment, and asked the
+evident owner of the first toboggan why he didn’t
+build a slide.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>“Dunno,” said that young person. “What’s a
+slide?”</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t know what a slide is?” exclaimed Wallace,
+glad to see that his scorn made an evident impression.
+“The only real way to get speed and
+distance out of a toboggan is to have a slide. You
+use up half your speed now by the friction of steering.
+All you’ve got to do is to make two banks of
+snow a couple of feet apart, and keep the sleds out.
+Then the chute between the banks will get almost
+glare ice, you won’t have to bother to steer, and you
+can go a mile a minute clear to the other end of the
+pasture.”</p>
+
+<p>“Gee, let’s build one, Joe,” exclaimed the second
+small boy.</p>
+
+<p>“Ain’t got no shovel,” said the first.</p>
+
+<p>“If you’ll bring shovels tomorrow afternoon, I’ll
+help you,” said Wallace.</p>
+
+<p>“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” the boy replied, with
+some scorn.</p>
+
+<p>“So it is, I forgot,” Wallace laughed. “Well,
+how about nine o’clock tomorrow morning, then?”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re on, Judge,” said Joe, easily, as he kicked
+the toboggan around to face down the slope. “Want
+to try a ride?”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace sat down on the cushionless toboggan, between
+the two boys, and with a yell of warning they
+started off. The additional weight in the centre
+made the task of steering too much for the helmsman.
+Two-thirds of the way down the toboggan began to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>pivot, skidded madly to the left, upset, and rolled all
+three riders over and over in the snow. They picked
+themselves up, laughing, while other coasters shouted
+and jeered. The man’s wrists and neck were full of
+snow. His nose was scratched by a piece of crust.
+His eyes were weeping. But he laughed as he rose.
+“That won’t happen when we get the slide,” he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>“Ho, that’s fun,” the owner of the toboggan answered.
+“Want to try it again?”</p>
+
+<p>“I think I’ll wait till morning,” said Wallace.
+“Good-bye till tomorrow.”</p>
+
+<p>“So long,” said the boys, turning from him at once,
+as if he no longer existed.</p>
+
+<p>He went back to the road, digging snow out of his
+neck and sleeves, and feeling rather sore and wrenched.
+In front of the house with the Doric porch he now
+observed a toboggan standing. The girl was nowhere
+visible, but the toboggan was a hopeful possibility!
+He went back to the hotel and unpacked his trunk
+while the early twilight came on and his wood fire
+sparkled cheerfully. He felt cheerful again himself
+now, and sleepy with the unaccustomed country air,
+and pleasantly tired and hungry. Supper was announced
+by a big bell clanged in the lower hall, and
+it was an excellent meal, with real maple syrup to
+pour on piping hot griddle cakes. Still sleepier and
+more contented, Wallace went back to his room to
+read, nodded over the pages in front of his fire, and
+finally decided to go to bed at the unheard-of hour of
+nine. After he had undressed and turned out the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>light, he suddenly became aware of moonlight outside.
+Going to the window, he saw it gleaming palely
+on the white roof of the church. The village street
+was still and almost deserted. The stores were
+closed. Save for a distant sleighbell, there was
+hardly a sound. He opened the window and sent his
+breath steaming out into the night, and then sucked
+back a great lungful of the sweet, stinging cold air.
+With a final glance at the white roof sleeping in the
+moonlight, he tumbled into bed, as the clock solemnly
+boomed nine, and almost before the last reverberation
+had died away into silence, he was asleep.</p>
+
+<p>He was awakened in the morning by the clangor
+of the breakfast bell, breaking strangely in upon his
+dreams, and for several moments he lay in bed enjoying
+the odd sensation of sunshine in his chamber and
+comparative quiet in the outside world. He heard
+sleighbells in the village street, and the voice of somebody
+saying “good mornin’” to somebody else, with
+the old Yankee nasal inflection, which was like forgotten
+music to his ear. At 8.30 he was through his
+breakfast, and set forth to find a snow shovel and a
+toboggan. There were plenty of shovels, but only
+one toboggan in the store.</p>
+
+<p>“Thet’s the last one,” said the storekeeper.
+“Kinder thought I warn’t goin’ ter sell it, seein’ it’s
+six dollars. The rest wuz three an’ four. Would you
+like the cushion, too? Kinder absorbs the shocks!”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace took the cushion, too, and set out down
+the main street dragging his new purchase and feeling
+rather sheepish. Nobody, however, paid much
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>attention to him. He looked for the girl at the house
+behind the evergreens, but she was not visible. The
+toboggan was still standing beside the Doric porch.
+He passed on, vaguely disappointed, and was soon at
+the hillside. His two friends of yesterday were already
+there, and with them six other small boys, with
+a total of four snow shovels. Evidently the word had
+gone forth that untoward events were on! Wallace
+was secretly pleased and rather flattered. He felt
+so shy with these boys that their response seemed to
+him a compliment.</p>
+
+<p>“Good morning!” he cried. “Well, you are
+ahead of time. I’ll bet you don’t get to school so
+early.”</p>
+
+<p>The boys grinned at this, looking at each other.
+Wallace felt more at ease.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he said, “let’s get busy right away. Let’s
+build the slide somewhere so it won’t interfere with
+the sleds. Over here a little to the left, eh?”</p>
+
+<p>The boys followed him to the left side of the slope,
+and under his direction they began to work.</p>
+
+<p>It did not take them long to raise banks nearly two
+feet high halfway down the hill, but before this much
+was completed a score of other coasters had arrived,
+and come over to watch the work. One large boy,
+with a sled, got into the incompleted slide and came
+whizzing down.</p>
+
+<p>“Hi, get out of that!” yelled the workers. “This
+is for toboggans.”</p>
+
+<p>“Aw, chase yourself, I’m goin’ down it again,”
+said the coaster, as he came back up the hill.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>“No, you’re not, is he, sir?” cried the workers.</p>
+
+<p>Thus appealed to, everybody looked at Wallace,
+including the large boy.</p>
+
+<p>That individual spoke up quickly. “I guess this
+hill’s as much mine as it is yours,” said he, with the
+characteristic aggressiveness of his type, “an’ I’ll
+coast where I please.”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace looked at him sharply. “You are considerable
+of a bully, aren’t you?” he said. “Well,
+I’m something of a bully myself. We’ve left all of
+this hill to sleds except just this narrow strip, which
+is going to be for toboggans. Everybody who’s decent
+will keep out of it with sleds. Anybody who
+isn’t decent, who’s just mean and nasty and selfish
+and not thoughtful for other people, will have me and
+all these eight boys to reckon with. Now, young
+man, go ahead and try to coast here, if you care to!”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace’s voice didn’t rise above a conversational
+key, but he looked the bully square in the eyes, and
+that individual slunk off to the other side of the hill.
+The smaller boys looked at the man with evident
+admiration, and began to talk excitedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Gee,” whispered Joe to Wallace, “Jim never got
+a lacin’ down like that before! I’ll bet he comes and
+spoils the slide tonight, though.”</p>
+
+<p>“When we get it done,” said the man, “we’ll offer
+to take him down it on a toboggan. That’s the way
+to pull his teeth. He’ll be ashamed then, maybe.”</p>
+
+<p>No sooner had he spoken, than something made
+him turn. Standing close behind him was the girl of
+yesterday. In the excitement, she had come up the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>hill without his seeing her. She was dressed in a
+white angora wool cap, a white angora sweater, and
+a short, heavy skirt, with heavy knee boots below it.
+She held a toboggan rope in her hand, and beside her
+stood a yellow-haired youngster of six, with cheeks
+like two ripe apples. She was looking at Wallace.
+He unconsciously smiled and half nodded as his gaze
+met hers. She spoke, rather to all the boys than to
+him.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s right,” she said, “you scorch Jim’s head
+with coals of fire and maybe it will do him good.
+Some of these boys are in my Sunday School class,”
+she added more directly to Wallace, “so I’ll just get
+a day ahead with the lesson!”</p>
+
+<p>The boys all laughed at this and Wallace said,
+“That’s right. <i>Carpe diem</i>, in a new sense!”</p>
+
+<p>Then he reluctantly turned back to the slide. Presently
+he saw the girl and her small charge tobogganing
+down the hills. He sent two of his own “gang,”
+as he called them, down the slide to see how it
+worked, and set the rest to completing the bottom
+part. It was soon done, and with a shout all the
+eight boys piled up to the top, crowded aboard the
+toboggans, and one after another went yelling down.
+After a few trips the bottom was packed smooth, and
+the coasters scooted clean across the pasture at the
+bottom to the very road.</p>
+
+<p>“Gee, this is great!” cried one of them.</p>
+
+<p>“You bet, best we ever had!” shouted another.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace looked along the hilltop and saw the girl.
+“Run and tell your teacher, Joe, that the slide is for
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>everybody who has a toboggan,” he said. “Is that
+her son with her?”</p>
+
+<p>“Ho, she’s Miss Woodford. That’s her sister’s
+kid,” said Joe, scampering off, while Wallace felt a
+secret relief and a glow of pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>Joe returned with the girl and two other younger
+girls as well, who had a toboggan.</p>
+
+<p>“We built the slide for everybody,” said Wallace
+to Miss Woodford. “It’s for the toboggans, so they
+won’t have to be steered. The sides make it perfectly
+safe even for children. Try it.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s very nice of you,” the girl smiled. “Our
+boys need a man to direct their play.”</p>
+
+<p>“I fear I’m a poor hand, and a very inexperienced
+one,” Wallace answered. “But I’m having a good
+time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Doubtless that is why the boys are,” she replied,
+as she tucked her skirts around her trim boot-legs,
+told her little nephew to hang on tight, and Wallace
+pushed them over the brim.</p>
+
+<p>The slide grew more and more slippery, and the
+fun more and more furious. Half the coasters came
+over to watch, or to beg for rides. Even Jim, the
+bully, cast envious eyes toward the slide. “Now’s a
+good time,” said Wallace, to a couple of boys. “Go
+over and offer Jim a ride.”</p>
+
+<p>“You do it, Joe,” said one of the boys.</p>
+
+<p>“No, you do it,” said Joe.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the matter, are you afraid?” said the
+man. “You just show him once you’re not afraid of
+him, and he’ll come down off his high horse.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>“Ho, I ain’t afraid!” cried Joe, going at once toward
+the bully.</p>
+
+<p>“Come on and try the slide on my toboggan, Jim,”
+the rest heard him saying.</p>
+
+<p>Jim scowled and hung back for a moment, but his
+curiosity got the better of him, and he came.</p>
+
+<p>“Take my toboggan, Joe,” said Wallace; “it’s
+bigger than yours.”</p>
+
+<p>Joe took it, Jim the bully and another boy and two
+girls piled on, and went screaming down the slide.
+The man smiled, and turned to meet the smile of Miss
+Woodford.</p>
+
+<p>“Won’t you try mine?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>He put her on the front, and held the small nephew
+between them. That young person was very solemn.
+Wallace could feel the muscles of his little arms
+tighten as he gripped the toboggan rails. His little
+face was set, his lips parted, his yellow hair blown
+about his temples from under his cap. He was deliciously
+frightened by the speed. As they came to
+rest at the bottom, however, he automatically relaxed,
+and let out a bottled-up yell.</p>
+
+<p>“Having a good time, son?” asked Wallace, as a
+small hand grasped the rope beside his arm.</p>
+
+<p>“My-name’s-Albert-Andrew-Goodwin,” the young
+person replied, all in one gasping breath. “I-think-this-slide’s-the-bestest-fun-I-ever-had.”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace laughed, and so did the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“My name is Wallace Miller and I quite agree
+with you,” he answered.</p>
+
+<p>“My name is Nora Woodford, and I’m not inclined
+to present a minority report,” the girl smiled.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>“What’s that, Auntie Nora, that thing you just
+said?” demanded Albert Andrew Goodwin.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s my way of saying the slide is lots of fun,”
+she replied.</p>
+
+<p>“Why don’t you just say it, then?” the boy asked.</p>
+
+<p>Again the grown-ups laughed, and Wallace felt a
+curious thrill through his glove as the little hand beside
+his on the toboggan rope pressed close against
+his fingers.</p>
+
+<p>At the top the small fellow took actual hold of his
+hand, with a most engaging smile, and demanded that
+he steer them down again. This time Albert sat at
+the front, and Wallace grasped the rails at either side
+of the girl, to hold her on, while she put protecting
+hands about her nephew. The slide was already like
+glass, and it was developing a few spots where the
+banks were not quite true and the toboggans were
+thrown from one side to the other. Two-thirds of
+the way down little Albert was whipped so sharply
+to the left that he let go of the rail. His aunt, with
+a scream, grabbed him hard, and the shift in her
+weight was more than Wallace could counteract at
+the speed they were traveling. The toboggan rode
+madly up the bank at an oblique angle and shot over
+on the other side, burying its nose in a drift and sending
+all three riders overboard in a complete header.
+Wallace was on his feet in a second, and had his arm
+about the girl, lifting her, for he saw that the child
+must be underneath.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you hurt?” he cried.</p>
+
+<p>“No, but Albert, quick!” she gasped.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing of Albert was visible save his legs. His
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>head and body had completely disappeared. The
+legs were quite still, and something inside of Wallace
+went down to his boots with the sickening lurch
+of a badly run elevator. He put his hands through
+the snow, grasped the body, and lifted it up. It
+came up looking like a small snowman, wabbled in
+his grasp, straightened itself, and suddenly emitted
+a wail.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, where are you hurt?” cried the girl, kneeling
+beside the child and dabbing the snow from his face
+and eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Albert blinked the water from his vision, meditatively
+lifted first one foot and then the other, stopped
+crying, and said, “Why, I ain’t!”</p>
+
+<p>The change was so comically sudden that both man
+and girl laughed in nervous relief.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you sure?” she urged.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” he replied stoutly. “Ho, that wa’n’t
+nothing!”</p>
+
+<p>Again Wallace helped the girl to her feet. “And
+you, are <i>you</i> sure?” he asked solicitously.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m all right,” she said. “I had Albert to land
+on. You’re a fine cushion, Albert.”</p>
+
+<p>“And I had both of you,” Wallace laughed. “It
+was a case of the women and children first, with a
+vengeance! Let me brush you.”</p>
+
+<p>As he stooped to do so, all three were suddenly
+aware of how snow-bepowdered they were, and
+laughed again, while the others on the hill, who had
+gathered about, laughed with them.</p>
+
+<p>“Thank heaven we can laugh!” Wallace whispered.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>“When I saw those two little leggings so still
+in the snow I seemed to grow ten years older.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked into his face, and shuddered, without
+speaking. It was as though they had touched
+hands across a sudden gulf. He brushed the snow
+from her clothes as best he could, and then he spanked
+it off Albert, and on an impulse strange to him put
+his arms about the little fellow and gave him a hug.
+His eyes looked up to meet those of the girl, which
+were regarding him oddly.</p>
+
+<p>“I didn’t know before that I liked kids,” he said,
+as if in apology.</p>
+
+<p>“You do. I’m sure,” she smiled.</p>
+
+<p>Before any more toboggans were allowed on the
+slide, Wallace and his gang made the banks higher
+and straighter at the dangerous points, and thus
+corrected the chute held like a vise. The coasters
+were soon whizzing down again.</p>
+
+<p>But before they could start back, the town clock
+struck twelve.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, gee, dinner time!” cried Joe. “I’d rather
+slide.”</p>
+
+<p>“The slide will be here this afternoon,” Wallace
+laughed. “You go home to dinner before your
+mother gets after you, Joe!”</p>
+
+<p>The rest grinned at Joe, and followed Wallace and
+Miss Woodford out of the field. It was a considerable
+procession which marched up the road. Little
+Albert refused his aunt’s hand, proudly insisting on
+tugging his own toboggan, and chattering of his adventure.
+Half a dozen small boys disputed for the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>right to drag Wallace’s. Another boy carried his
+snow shovel. Even the bully was in the group.</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked back, laughing. “I believe you
+are the Pied Piper,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“If I should confess to you,” he answered, “that
+this morning I was afraid of these boys, as timid as
+a child before them, maybe you wouldn’t believe me.
+But I’m not used to kids.”</p>
+
+<p>She again darted an odd look of curiosity at him.
+“Are you visiting in town?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head. “I don’t know a soul here.
+I’m at the Mansion House. I just came—saw the
+name North Topsville on the time table and liked it.
+I’m hunting for Christmas.”</p>
+
+<p>Once more she looked at him. “That shouldn’t
+be hard to find. Christmas is nearly everywhere,
+isn’t it?”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace shook his head. “I’ve not met Christmas
+personally in a decade, at least,” he answered.</p>
+
+<p>The girl paused in front of the house amid the evergreens.
+“I think we can introduce it to you here,”
+she said, with a bright smile. “We keep quite a
+supply on hand in Topsville.”</p>
+
+<p>Then she nodded to him, and to the children, and
+turned up the path. The bully touched his cap.</p>
+
+<p>“Boys,” said Wallace, “don’t you know what to
+do when a lady meets you, or leaves you? What is
+it, Joe?”</p>
+
+<p>Joe turned red. “Touch yer cap,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly,” said Wallace, “and Jim, here, was the
+only boy who did it. Good for you, Jim!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>It was Jim’s turn to color—with pleasure as well
+as embarrassment. The other boys looked at him.
+The villain of the early morning had now become
+the hero! They scattered their several ways in some
+perplexity, while Wallace walked on to his dinner,
+every nerve tingling with the excitement of the morning,
+the unusual contact with small boys, the thrill
+of little Albert’s touch, his warm baby arms and
+hand, the sudden surge of horror at the thought of
+injury to him, the feeling of intimacy which followed
+the accident, the perfume of the girl’s hair, her bright,
+friendly smile, the whole atmosphere of naïve enjoyment.
+It wasn’t much like his mornings in New
+York, he reflected. And what an appetite he had!</p>
+
+<p>But he discovered after dinner that he was tired,
+that the muscles of his legs ached from climbing the
+hill, that his hands were chapped and his face
+smarted. Indolence stole over him, and he curled up
+before the fire in his room and read a book, until the
+light began to fail. Then he went out once more,
+into the cold twilight, and his feet led him up the
+street to the house with the Doric porch. He told
+himself that he must inquire if Albert were really unhurt.
+Almost at the gate he met Miss Woodford,
+Albert, and several of the boys, which answered his
+unspoken question.</p>
+
+<p>“Hi, where were you this after’?” called Joe.
+“Gee, the slide’s so slippery now it’s most ice!”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, an’ I mos’ fell off again twice!” cried little
+Albert Andrew Goodwin, running up to him and
+thrusting a tiny hand into his.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>“Did you?” cried Wallace. “Well, now you see
+why you’ve got to hang on tight, all right.”</p>
+
+<p>The other boys moved on, and Joe led them in
+touching his cap to the girl.</p>
+
+<p>(“That’s right, Joe,” whispered Wallace, as the
+boy passed him.)</p>
+
+<p>Miss Woodford acknowledged the salute with a
+bright smile and a “Good night.” The little chap
+kept fast hold of Wallace’s hand.</p>
+
+<p>“I gotta snow man in the back yard. You come
+’n see it,” he pleaded, tugging at his new friend’s
+fingers.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace laughed, a little embarrassed. “I guess
+not today, Albert,” he said. “It’s bedtime for little
+boys and snow men.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ho, snow men don’t go to bed at all, an’ I don’t
+go till seven!” cried Albert. “Please tell him to
+come, Auntie Nora.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve asked him, dear,” said Auntie Nora, with
+a smile. “I’m sure he’ll come for you if anybody.”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace looked at her, and her eyes met his for
+a second and did not tell him to refuse, so with
+Albert’s hand still tugging at his, he was taken up
+the path between the evergreens, around the big,
+square house, into a large garden space, where a snow
+man stood, with lumps of coal for eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, how do you do, Mr. I. C. Snow!” cried
+Wallace, pretending to shake hands. “I am glad to
+see you looking so well. I trust you don’t find this
+weather too cold for you?”</p>
+
+<p>Albert shouted with glee. “Say it again!” he cried.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>Wallace put his ear to the snow man’s mouth, and
+shook his head gravely. “Oh, that’s very sad!” he
+said. “Very sad!”</p>
+
+<p>“What does he say?” Albert asked, crowding
+close.</p>
+
+<p>“He says he’s got such a cold from not wearing
+a hat that he’s lost his voice,” Wallace answered.</p>
+
+<p>The boy looked solemnly puzzled for a second, and
+then burst into shouts of laughter.</p>
+
+<p>“Ain’t he funny, Auntie Nora?” he demanded.
+“The snow man don’t really talk.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>What?</i>” cried Wallace. “Well, I guess you
+never listened very close!”</p>
+
+<p>“I like you,” said Albert suddenly, grabbing his
+hand again. “Come in an’ see my blocks.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do,” added the girl, noting Wallace’s hesitancy;
+“we will have some tea.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are very kind,” Wallace answered, “but I’m
+afraid our little friend is forcing your hospitality.”</p>
+
+<p>“We always have tea at this time,” she smiled.
+Her eyes were friendly. In her white cap and
+sweater, her cheeks red with a day in the open, her
+hair curling out rebelliously about her temples, she
+was a temptation hard to resist. The warm little
+hand was tugging at his fingers. But Wallace managed
+to say, “Another time, sonny,” and made his
+way to the street.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning he debated the propriety of
+going to church. He had not gone to church for so
+many years that the idea was invested with novelty.
+Yet he knew that he was going in reality to see the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>girl again, and it seemed hardly an appropriate
+motive. However, he went!</p>
+
+<p>A farmer sat directly in front of him, with a sunburned
+neck like wrinkled leather, rising above a rubber
+collar. Wallace thought of his own grandfather,
+who had been a Yankee farmer, too. The whole
+congregation, and the bare meeting house with its
+gallery on three sides and its lofty pulpit reached by
+a winding stair, reminded him of his childhood. He
+saw Miss Woodford in the choir. She wore black
+furs, which became her as much as white. Presently
+she sang a solo, and her voice was sweet and quite
+evidently trained. Wallace found himself suddenly
+thrilled by it, as he used to be years ago by the voices
+of those he loved, and long after the congregation had
+rustled to silence and the minister had begun to
+preach, he sat with his eyes on the choir, in a delicious
+revery.</p>
+
+<p>When the sermon was over, and the congregation
+had sung the closing hymn and bowed for the benediction,
+there was an immediate outpouring from the
+pews and the hum of greetings. This was the social
+hour of the week. The minister came down from the
+pulpit, exchanging salutations. Children came running
+in on their way to Sunday School in the vestry.
+Neighbors chatted in groups. Before Wallace had
+fairly left his pew, a farmer in starched best was grasping
+him by the hand, and hoping he would come again.
+The minister came up and greeted him. A moment
+later he saw Miss Woodford drawing near. She put
+out her hand. “Good morning,” she said. Then,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>turning to the minister, she added, “Mr. Miller
+taught some of my boys in one day to do what I’ve
+not been able to teach them in a year—to touch
+their hats. I really think you ought to give him a
+Sunday School class.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good gracious!” gasped Wallace, with such
+evidently genuine amaze that the others laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“I should be delighted to get a man into the Sunday
+School,” said the minister. “Who knows, we
+might start up some Boy Scout work!”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Miller is just the man,” said the girl, with
+a twinkle.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think this is fair of you, Miss Woodford,”
+Wallace put in. “For all you know, I’m a heathen—maybe
+the Pied Piper, as you suggested.”</p>
+
+<p>“The Pied Piper would have made an excellent
+scout master,” the minister smiled. “Well, Mr.
+Miller, if you stay in North Topsville long, we shall
+hope to catch you yet.”</p>
+
+<p>He moved on, leaving the two young people together.
+A second woman, in black, drew near, a few
+years older than Miss Woodford. “May I introduce
+the mother of your friend Albert—my sister, Mrs.
+Goodwin,” said the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“I am always delighted to meet Albert’s friends,”
+the second smiled. “He tells me you wouldn’t
+come to see his blocks. I really think you will have
+to come if only to keep him quiet. For tea tomorrow,
+perhaps?”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace bowed, as Albert’s mother passed on.
+The girl turned toward the vestry. “Now to my
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>class,” she said. “I do wish you would take it, instead.”
+Her eyes met his for a second, half twinkling,
+half earnest.</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head. “Really, I’m unfit. You
+don’t know.” He spoke seriously.</p>
+
+<p>Their eyes were together a second longer, unspoken
+questions passing between them, and then
+she left him. As he went down the path from the
+church he heard behind him the shrill piping of the
+Sunday School, singing the opening hymn, and he
+smiled at the sound, for it touched forgotten stops in
+his memory. Gilsey, he reflected, was just about
+getting up at this moment, after his Sunday morning
+loaf in bed, and was probably swearing at the hot
+water tap as he shaved himself. Smith and Stedman,
+maybe, were finishing breakfast at the club,
+and solemnly debating the tremendous question of
+how they would kill the remainder of the day.
+Mercer was getting ready the Sunday afternoon
+assignment book in a newspaper office stale with the
+tobacco smoke of the night before, and doubtless
+planning to get away early for a bridge game—his
+Sunday afternoon recreation. How they would all
+sneer at Wallace if they knew he was coming from
+church, and listening with wistful delight to the drone
+of Sunday School behind him!</p>
+
+<p>The following afternoon, when school was out,
+Wallace dragged his toboggan to the hill, and joined
+once more in the sport. The slide was still intact.
+The bully’s fangs had evidently been drawn. Miss
+Woodford was there, with Albert. For an hour
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>Wallace’s toboggan was packed with shouting small
+boys, who treated him now like one of them, an
+unconscious flattery which he found very pleasant.
+Then, as the sun began to sink through a green sky
+into the tops of the hemlocks far across the snowy
+fields, Wallace left his toboggan behind, for Joe to
+take proud charge of, and walked home with the girl
+and Albert. The shouts died away behind them.
+It was almost twilight in the village street. As they
+came to Miss Woodford’s gate, Wallace saw a red
+lamp in the window, glowing between the evergreens.
+He paused abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t tell you what a curious sensation that
+lighted window square gives me, gleaming behind
+the trees over the snow,” he said. “But in some
+strange way it takes me back to the days when I
+was no older than Albert, and Christmas was a
+reality. Ever since I came to North Topsville I’ve
+had a curious sensation of familiarity, though I
+was never here before in my life. Just now, if
+my mother should be waiting at the door, I’d not
+be surprised.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your mother is dead?” the girl asked.</p>
+
+<p>“And my father. I left New England many years
+ago, and I guess I’ve been a man without a country
+ever since. Now I’m coming back home.”</p>
+
+<p>It may be he spoke wistfully, for the girl did not
+reply for a moment, and little Albert ran ahead with
+the toboggan.</p>
+
+<p>“We New Englanders never quite forget, do we?”
+she finally said. “We are like the Irish in that. I—I
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>trust you will continue to feel at home in North
+Topsville. We are surely New England here, especially
+in our ratio of the sexes! I’m one of sixty-seven
+old maids in this small village.”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace looked at her, with her firm body in its
+white sweater, her full-colored cheeks, her keen,
+dancing eyes, and suddenly laughed. “Then that’s
+proof positive of Mr. Shaw’s ‘Man and Superman’
+theory,” he said, “and—well, some of you are
+merely indifferent.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl darted a look at him. “No woman ever
+tells what she really thinks of Mr. Shaw’s theory,”
+she replied, leading the way up the path.</p>
+
+<p>Presently Wallace was trying to drink tea and reproduce
+the Woolworth Tower in blocks at the same
+time, in a square, mahogany-furnished room which
+appeared to have been lived in for a century and yet
+to be freshly and cheerfully of today. He saw Miss
+Woodford for the first time without hat or wraps.
+She had run upstairs and returned with slippers on
+instead of high boots, and he noticed that her stockings
+were of heavy wool. Somehow he was pleased
+at this common-sense concession to the climate. Her
+hair was copious and rebellious. Inside of the house,
+she looked riotously healthy, in odd contrast to the
+women of New York. Her sister, evidently a recent
+widow, was more subdued, though she, too, had a
+twinkle in her eyes, a palpable inheritance from the
+white-haired woman who sat upright and energetic
+at the tea table and astounded Wallace by saying,
+“Since my daughter spoke of you I have read one of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>your stories in a magazine, and I don’t like it very
+much.”</p>
+
+<p>“Which one was it?” asked Wallace, looking up
+from the pile of blocks in front of him on the rug.
+His eyes met the old lady’s, and she seemed pleased
+at the challenge.</p>
+
+<p>“It was about a man and a woman—all magazine
+stories are—who have all kinds of emotions at
+a violin recital. It seemed rather turgid to me. I
+call that form of affection a sublimated species of
+Dutch courage.”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace joined in the laugh. “I guess you are
+right,” he said, “but you must try to excuse me as
+a New Yorker. You see, we live in such a restricted
+round of artificial pursuits and pleasures that we
+have to substitute art for nature as a stimulant.”</p>
+
+<p>“Speaking of stimulants, have some more tea,”
+said the old lady. “Albert, pass the gentleman’s
+cup.”</p>
+
+<p>“He ain’t got the tower did yet,” said the boy.</p>
+
+<p>“Albert!”</p>
+
+<p>Albert brought the cup.</p>
+
+<p>Presently Albert’s mother took him off, protesting,
+to his supper, and Wallace and the girl sat before the
+fire while the mother chatted on an amazing variety
+of topics, evidently pleased at the chance of a new
+listener, and asked innumerable questions about
+affairs of the hour, which the man answered as best
+he could.</p>
+
+<p>The girl came with him to the outer door.</p>
+
+<p>“I like your mother,” he said.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>“Most people do, who aren’t afraid of her,” she
+smiled.</p>
+
+<p>As he drew on his gloves, she stood in the doorway
+not minding the cold, and the last glimpse he had
+was of her face, rosy and smiling, in the slit of golden
+light, her eyes alone telling him good night, while
+the face of Albert was suddenly squeezed through
+between her skirts and the door frame and his small
+voice piped, “I got a steam train you ain’t saw!”</p>
+
+<p>“You <i>haven’t seen</i>,” Wallace heard faintly, as the
+door closed.</p>
+
+<p>Even the little shops in North Topsville were gay
+for Christmas. Nearly all had small evergreens before
+the doors, and attempted window displays. As
+Wallace walked back for supper, it occurred to him
+that he ought to buy Albert a present. But there
+seemed to be nothing quite satisfactory in the local
+market. It would be a good joke to write and ask
+one of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association
+to select it for him in New York. He smiled
+as he thought of Mercer’s remarks when the request
+came. What was the name of that Fifth Avenue
+toy shop, anyhow? Wallace searched his memory
+till the name came to him, and wrote at once for a
+toy aeroplane such as he had seen in the windows, the
+propeller operated by rubber bands. But he didn’t
+write to Mercer. He wanted to be sure of the toy.</p>
+
+<p>The next day it snowed, a soft, steady, dry fall,
+and after working all the morning before his cheerful
+fire, the ideas coming with unaccustomed fertility,
+Wallace set out for a tramp. He wondered if he
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>dared ask the girl to go with him, and was still debating
+the point when he found himself on her porch.
+Yes, she would go; she loved to tramp in the snow.
+In three minutes she reappeared, wrapped in white
+woollens, and strode beside him down the path, while
+the wails of Albert were heard at being left behind.</p>
+
+<p>“Poor chap,” said Wallace, “it’s a great tragedy
+not to be allowed to do what the big folks are doing.
+Perhaps I can make him a snow lady to cheer him
+up when we get back. Where shall we walk?”</p>
+
+<p>“How would you like to take a tramp to Christmas?”
+the girl asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Have we time?” he smiled.</p>
+
+<p>She didn’t answer, but set off up the road at a
+swinging pace.</p>
+
+<p>“You see, the honor of the town is rather at stake,”
+she said presently. “We can’t let you get away still
+a heathen. We’ve <i>got</i> to show you Christmas.”</p>
+
+<p>“Will we meet Santa Claus?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no, not in the daytime, silly. But we may
+see the prints of his reindeers’ hoofs.”</p>
+
+<p>They turned up a side road after half a mile of
+brisk walking, passed one or two farmhouses, and
+began to climb a hill. The snow, which had been
+stinging their faces, was now abating. The wind
+had broken into the northwest, and in that quarter a
+rift of blue sky appeared.</p>
+
+<p>“Look,” cried the girl, “it is clearing! Oh, I’m
+going to show you something beautiful!”</p>
+
+<p>They now turned up a wood road, and began to
+make their way with difficulty through unbroken
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>snow, four inches of feathery new fall on top, and
+beneath that the half-crusted old snow through
+which their feet broke. Wallace found it hard work,
+and looked at his companion solicitously. “Isn’t
+this too hard walking for you?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you getting tired?” she smiled. “We really
+should have brought snowshoes, but you’ll have to
+go a considerable distance to fag me. I’m used to
+it.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are quite different from some women I’ve
+known in recent years, that’s a fact,” said he. “You
+are so wonderfully healthy!”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m disgustingly so,” she laughed. “Look!
+One of Santa’s reindeer!”</p>
+
+<p>She was on her knees in the snow, examining a
+hoof print. “And there are more!” she added.
+“See, he’s tramped around that sumach bush, and
+nibbled off all the buds!”</p>
+
+<p>“Are we getting near Christmas?” asked Wallace.</p>
+
+<p>She rose, shook her skirt, and started on. “We
+are,” she cried, “and here’s the sun to decorate the
+trees!”</p>
+
+<p>Sure enough, as she spoke the sun came out, and
+instantly the woods around them—a grove of young
+chestnuts and maples—became radiant with frostwork
+on every twig, arching into groins of tracery
+overhead. Wallace fairly gasped with delight, and
+the girl smiled into his face.</p>
+
+<p>“Have you anything as nice as that in New York?”
+she said. “This is all mine, too. I own this wood
+lot all myself.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>She hurried him on through the sunlit, elfin aisles
+of the frost cathedral till suddenly the hard timber
+ended, and a grove of young spruce and hemlock
+confronted them, with now and then a patriarchal
+old pine lifting far above the lesser trees and holding
+out the dazzling snow on its branches against the
+blue sky.</p>
+
+<p>“Come in, come in,” the girl whispered, “Christmas
+is in here!”</p>
+
+<p>Close behind her, he followed in among the evergreens.
+The branches shook snow down upon them
+as they passed through till they were powdered white.
+A few chickadees hopped, half invisible, among the
+thick foliage. A moment later they stood in an open
+glade, where a few dead goldenrod stalks stood up in
+lovely Japanese simplicity above the white carpet,
+and all about them was a ring of perfect Christmas
+trees, each loaded with snow on its lateral branches,
+dazzling snow against the green in the afternoon sun.
+Above was the blue winter sky. Only the chickadees’
+song broke the perfect silence.</p>
+
+<p>“This is where the Christmas trees live,” said
+the girl, softly. “Now, do you believe?”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe,” he answered. “And there is a present
+for me on every branch.”</p>
+
+<p>“What is that?”</p>
+
+<p>He looked into her face. “Perhaps I can’t tell
+you now,” he answered. “I shall have to take it
+home and open it. I’m not used to presents, and I
+can’t guess from the feel of the bundle.”</p>
+
+<p>“I hope it’s something nice,” she smiled.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>“I’m sure of that,” said he, his eyes still on hers.</p>
+
+<p>So they stood for an instant, their eyes meeting,
+and then her gaze dropped.</p>
+
+<p>They spoke more seriously as they tramped
+homeward.</p>
+
+<p>“Your mother’s criticism of my story, it was just—I
+see that now,” he said. “After all, to anyone
+who lives near woods like these, who has children to
+care for, and neighbors’ troubles to adjust, and the
+welfare of a community on his conscience, the life
+of some of us in New York, between theatres and
+concerts and clubs and teas, must seem rather—well,
+rather useless. I’ve thought sometimes—most
+of the time, I fear—that life outside of New
+York was a pretty dull and deadening thing, that I
+couldn’t be happy anywhere else. That’s the
+typical New York view. Yet all the while these
+woods were here, these elfin aisles of frost and twig—and—and
+you walking down them.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know the New York view very well,” she answered,
+after the briefest pause, in which his last
+personality seemed to hover between them till she put
+it from her, not angrily, still less coquettishly, but
+rather as an interruption to graver thought. “But
+if you lived here in North Topsville long you would
+learn that there is something to be said for New
+York, too. I should hate to live in New York all
+my days. I think I should rise up like Samson and
+push over the walls if I were cooped up in a flat.
+But you noticed how Mother just ate you up conversationally?
+Well, that was because you came from
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>New York, I mean because you had touched all the
+currents of thought and activity just by being there
+amid so many active people. We have to go down
+to New York once in a while to restock our brains
+as well as our wardrobes. And you’ve no idea how
+good the old street looks when we come back!”</p>
+
+<p>“But here,” Wallace said, “you have neighbors,
+you have a community life, you are of use to other
+people. I suppose one could be in town, too, if he
+were big enough to realize the opportunities—to go
+out for them. But the average man in a city isn’t
+big enough.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of use to other people, yes,” she answered,
+eagerly. “That more than anything else is at the
+bottom of what silly little philosophy of life I, as a
+woman, am permitted to have. My friends in New
+York ask me, as they are rushing me off to a concert
+or a theatre or a tea, what I find to do with myself
+in the country all winter. I don’t tell them—what’s
+the use? But there’s so much to do! So
+much I’m not fitted to do, though I try. You know
+Joe, who helped you build the slide—the merry,
+red-haired little chap? You must like Joe! Joe’s
+father drinks. How are we going to keep Joe from
+drinking? We mustn’t let him go the same way,
+must we? That’s just one of a hundred problems—all
+too hard for me. Sometimes I come out here to
+these woods and just ask and ask for help!”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace looked into her flushed, eager face, lovely
+in its transfiguration of earnestness, and something
+in his own soul rose up and choked him. He saw
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>his life as utter selfishness, and he was ashamed,
+ashamed as he had never been before.</p>
+
+<p>“I—I—came here looking for Christmas,” he
+said slowly, “but I guess it’s something different
+from what I thought. I guess I was just a sentimental
+searcher after my lost childhood. Christmas
+is—is service, isn’t it?”</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked at him, and suddenly put out her
+hand. He took it in his. “Yes, oh yes!” she
+answered. “It is service and the joy of service. It
+is just being glad of the chance! Oh, please always
+believe that!”</p>
+
+<p>She gave his hand an eager pressure, while her face
+glowed to his.</p>
+
+<p>“I promise,” he answered.</p>
+
+<p>Then her fingers slipped away, and they tramped
+on in silence, deep in their thoughts. The woods
+seemed more than ever to him a frost cathedral.</p>
+
+<p>Out on the open road, in the freedom of clear
+walking, they swung along at a faster pace, and
+laughter returned. They entered her house for tea,
+and once more Wallace saw her rebellious hair
+about her face, and once more the little hands of
+Albert grasped his, dragging him to see his toys,
+and sent a thrill to his heart, and once more he sat
+opposite to the girl in the firelight and talked, with
+the mother leading the conversation. He felt as if
+he were once more almost a part of a real family,
+as he had not been for many, many years. It was
+with a pang that he rose to go. The girl shook hands
+with him in the door. He could only say “Thank
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>you,” awkwardly, and went to his hotel in a daze,
+like a man walking in new worlds not yet realized.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning he wrote to New York for a
+Boy Scout manual, and for more of his clothes and
+possessions. At dinner a message came from the girl
+asking him to join in a trip to the woods after a
+Christmas tree, and of course he went. At the
+Woodford house he found a big lumber sledge waiting,
+with Albert already dancing up and down beside the
+driver, and Joe, with three other boys, dangling their
+legs behind. The girl soon joined them, and they
+went jingling up the street, the youngsters chattering,
+and yelling at their companions on the walk.</p>
+
+<p>When they reached the grove of spruce and hemlock,
+everybody sprang from the sledge and began
+to prospect for trees.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t let them cut any from the Christmas ring,”
+whispered Wallace. “I—I shouldn’t want that
+ring altered. Please!”</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked at him, and colored a little, nodding
+an affirmation. “You haven’t told me what the
+present was,” she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>“I will—some day,” he answered. “I can’t
+quite make it out myself yet.”</p>
+
+<p>For the next five minutes there was much scampering
+about and excitement and shouting. But presently
+each boy selected a tree, and Wallace, leading
+Albert by the hand, up to his tiny knees in snow,
+found a tree which just suited that young person, and
+then the ax went the round, and the sledge was loaded
+with the fragrant evergreens.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>On the homeward trip, Wallace was aware of the
+old Christmas tingle in his veins, for beside him the
+boys chattered of their holiday hopes, of sleds and
+books and tools and toys long desired; behind him
+was the pile of fragrant spruce; all about him was
+the white world and the cold air and the jingle of
+sleighbells. But he was aware of something else—strange
+and new, of which his memory had no record.
+He felt an odd, new tenderness toward these children;
+their chatter was music to him, yes, to him who lived
+between his club and his apartment and never saw
+a child from one month to the next! He put an arm
+about Albert to hold him on the sledge, and longed
+suddenly to press the little body hard against his
+side. He was aware, too, of the girl—above all of
+the girl; but not, somehow, apart from these other
+little lives and this new tenderness for childhood, but
+rather as the crown and completion of his mood. He
+thought of it first as his mood, and then mentally
+altered the word. No, it was not a mood. It was a
+new, spiritual attitude, surely. It was his present on
+the Christmas trees, the present <i>she</i> had given him.
+He longed to tell her of it. He looked at her, over
+the laughing, eager faces of the boys, and her eyes
+smiled back. He was too happy to speak. Perhaps
+she knew that, for she did not speak, either. When
+he took her hand to help her alight, it seemed to him
+as if they were older friends than when the ride began.
+An hour later, in the twilight dimness of her hall, she
+said to him:</p>
+
+<p>“Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Mother wants you
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>to dine with us—early, because of Albert—and
+maybe you’ll help us set up the tree and decorate it.
+We’ll try to be as Christmasy as we can for you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tomorrow I’ll—I’ll tell you what the present
+was,” he answered. “Ah, you’ve shown me Christmas
+already. I can’t explain—perhaps I shouldn’t
+say anything—but somehow I have felt today as
+if I had known you a long time, as if I had known
+you always, but something had separated us.” He
+laughed a little, embarrassed how to continue,
+for she was silent, her face averted. “I—guess
+that’s a pretty common way for a man to feel when
+he meets somebody who comes into his life with a
+big, glad, upsetting rush,” he went on. Then he
+finished lamely, “Rosetti has a poem about it, I
+recall.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a long silence. In the house behind
+Wallace could hear Albert’s voice, chattering excitedly
+to his mother as he ate his supper. In the
+sitting room he could hear the old lady poking the
+fire energetically—she did everything energetically.
+A big grandfather’s clock on the stair landing ticked
+in time to his heart throbs—a curious, irrelevant
+fact which his mind laid hold of as the mind will
+in such tense moments. Finally the girl spoke, her
+voice low, but her eyes looking frankly up into his.</p>
+
+<p>“What you have just said seems to connect me, a
+little more personally than I’m afraid I deserve, with
+Christmas,” she answered. “Isn’t it really little
+Albert you’ve known so long, not I?”</p>
+
+<p>“It is you—Auntie Nora,” he whispered back.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>“Oh, I can’t tell you now, but I will—I will!
+Why were all the intervening years?”</p>
+
+<p>“We are taught there is a reason for everything,”
+she smiled, her eyes veiled as a woman can veil her
+eyes when she chooses. But her color was high, nor
+did she move away from him. In the half dusk of
+the hall they were close together to see each other’s
+faces, and to hear each other’s low-spoken words.
+Her presence thrilled him. “Good night,” he suddenly
+whispered, taking her hand and holding it hard
+in his. “I shall find Christmas tomorrow!”</p>
+
+<p>“I—I hope so,” she whispered back.</p>
+
+<p>Her smile had gone, and the veil from her eyes.
+They seemed suddenly the eyes of all good women he
+was looking into. They gazed into his and told him
+in some mysterious way that a bond existed between
+him and her, that she desired his happiness, that she
+desired it to be the happiness which comes from the
+highest living. Her hand was warm in his. She did
+not withdraw it, but held his fingers firmly, while
+her eyes were lifted telling him these things the
+tongue cannot utter. His own eyes filled with
+strange tears, of happiness and humbleness, and he
+left her in silence.</p>
+
+<p>At his hotel room he found the big parcel containing
+Albert’s aeroplane, and also, in his mail, a final
+threat from the other members of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide
+Association. With a smile, he
+put the letter in his pocket, and, unpacking the
+aeroplane, consumed the half hour before dinner
+putting it together. When it was assembled, he
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>placed it on his bed, contemplated it in the light of
+Albert’s emotions—and found it good.</p>
+
+<p>It was there on the bed when he came up from
+dinner—a child’s toy in his room, a warming reminder,
+a symbol. He drew a picture and wrote a
+poem to go with it, and then, seeing the moonlight
+on the village roofs, he went out into the street, his
+shoes squeaking on the packed snow in the zero
+weather, and swung up the road. In the house behind
+the evergreens the sitting-room window squares
+glowed warmly. Inside, by the fire or the lamp, she
+was sitting. Wallace two weeks before would have
+laughed down the suggestion that he could be such a
+banal idiot as to haunt the roadway before a woman’s
+house, thrilled by the thought that she was inside.
+Yet here he was, in the moonlight, gazing at the red
+window squares beyond the snowy evergreens, all
+his conscious being flooded with the memory of the
+girl within and the sense of home and hearth and
+loved ones.</p>
+
+<p>Home and hearth—those words began to chime
+in his brain. Losing them, one lost Christmas.
+Christmas was service, and the joy and celebration of
+service, she had said. But were not they, the home
+and hearth, at the beginning and the end of service?
+What was all the industrial struggle of the world for
+at the bottom but to gain them? What was liberty
+but the opportunity to enjoy them? What generous
+or holy impulse but owed its birth to them, where
+even the race is born? The light went out behind
+the evergreens, and a moment later reappeared in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>the second story. He saw a figure come to the window,
+look for a second, and then draw down the
+shade. It was she! That was her chamber!
+Foolishly, happily, tenderly, Wallace lifted his face
+toward it and shaped his lips into a kiss.</p>
+
+<p>As he went back to the hotel his life seemed as
+clear before him as the shadows of the tree trunks
+cast by the moonlight on the snow.</p>
+
+<p>Late the next afternoon, when he arrived at the
+house behind the evergreens, a large, mysterious parcel
+under his arm, Albert greeted him in the hall with
+shouts of delight, demanding to know if the parcel
+was for him.</p>
+
+<p>“For you? What an idea!” said Wallace. “I
+met Santa Claus just now flying over the church, and
+he dropped this down to me, telling me to give it
+to the best boy in North Topsville. You don’t get
+it unless you can prove you’re the best boy. My!
+I had a hard time catching it, for Santa was up nearly
+as high as the top of the steeple when he dropped it.
+Lucky I’m a ball player!”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m the bestest boy,” said Albert. “My mother
+said so yesterday to Mrs. Perkins, ’cause I heard
+her.”</p>
+
+<p>“What does Auntie Nora say? The law requires
+two witnesses, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“Auntie Nora says it will depend on how Albert
+behaves tonight,” said a voice on the landing.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace looked up. The girl he had seen only in
+rough short skirt and outing woollens, with rebellious
+hair, was descending toward him in silks, a jeweled
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>pendant at her bare throat, her shoulders gleaming.
+She was very beautiful, and the hand she extended
+toward him might, he thought, have been the hand
+of a princess which he should stoop and kiss.</p>
+
+<p>“Hi, Auntie Nora’s all dressed up!” cried Albert.
+“Why’d you all dress up, Auntie?”</p>
+
+<p>The princess blushed and laughed, and said, “Now
+Auntie Nora thinks you’re <i>not</i> the best boy in town,
+because good boys don’t make personal remarks.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I think you’re very beautiful,” said Albert,
+suddenly throwing his arms about her. “Isn’t she,
+Mr. Miller?”</p>
+
+<p>“She is, indeed, Albert, she is the loveliest lady
+in the world!” Wallace answered, his voice intense,
+his eyes looking over Albert, fascinated.</p>
+
+<p>The girl hid her face on Albert’s shoulder, while
+that young person added the further comment,
+“Why, your cheek’s orful hot, Auntie.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now you’re the <i>worst</i> boy in town,” she said,
+“and you won’t get Santa’s box, for certain!”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not so sure,” said the man, as Albert freed
+himself from his aunt and rushed off with the box
+to the sitting room.</p>
+
+<p>The girl had scarce lifted her rosy face to Wallace,
+their eyes meeting in silence, when her mother and
+sister descended the stairs, and the cord was snapped.
+But it was at the girl’s side that Wallace entered
+the sitting room, and as they passed through the
+door together their hands brushed, and he knew that
+she, too, felt the spark.</p>
+
+<p>In the middle of the sitting room lay Albert’s tree,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>mingling its odor with the odor of burning apple
+wood. Albert was hovering about it. “How’s it
+going to stand up?” he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe we’ll bore a hole in the floor,” Wallace
+suggested.</p>
+
+<p>Albert regarded him gravely. “No, I don’t think
+Grandmother would approve,” said he, lapsing as he
+sometimes did into a quaint adult vocabulary.</p>
+
+<p>“When I was little, we used a tub of furnace coal,”
+Wallace laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“Come on!” cried Albert. “I know where the
+tub is!”</p>
+
+<p>His mother grabbed his flying coat tails, and diverted
+him to the dining room. The excitement of
+dining with the family, of candles and turkey, of a
+big tinsel star suspended over the centre of the table,
+made him quite forget what he was about, and he
+was talking rapidly as he pulled up his chair.</p>
+
+<p>“Albert!” said his grandmother.</p>
+
+<p>The three women bowed their heads, and Wallace
+bowed his.</p>
+
+<p>Albert drew in his breath, expelled it in a grace,
+had just enough left for the “Amen,” and instantly
+resumed his interrupted chatter. The elders exchanged
+smiles, but Wallace was thinking how at that
+moment five members of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide
+Association were on their way
+toward Delmonico’s, and of what a contrast to this
+little act of old-fashioned devotion the preliminaries
+of that feast would be. He grinned to himself at the
+irony of it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>Wallace’s attention during dinner was divided between
+the girl at his side and the boy opposite, between
+efforts to talk sense and nonsense, for Albert
+loved his nonsense, and demanded minute details of
+Santa Claus’s appearance as he drove over the church
+steeple, which he accepted with the paradoxically
+trustful unbelief of small boyhood. Wallace finally
+got into a considerable argument with the old lady
+regarding the number of reindeer in Santa’s team,
+she insisting that in her day, at any rate, there used
+to be twelve. In the excitement of the debate, the
+plum pudding was forgotten, and suddenly it appeared,
+burning merrily, and then everybody stopped
+talking to cheer.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner, Albert was permitted to stay up long
+enough to see the tree mounted. He went for a tub,
+while his aunt took Wallace to the cellar for a big
+hod of furnace coal. One must make all the preparations
+one’s self on Christmas Eve! She held her
+skirts high as they went laughing over the dusty, uncemented
+floor, and her silk-clad ankles shone in the
+dim light. In the far corners of the cellar dark
+shadows seemed to crouch and stir. She gave a
+mocking little shiver.</p>
+
+<p>“I used to be so terrified down here when I was a
+child!” she said. “I don’t remember whether it
+was rats or ghosts.”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace filled the hod, and on the way back from
+the bin stopped in front of the furnace.</p>
+
+<p>“I want to look into a furnace,” he said. “I
+haven’t been down in a cellar and looked into a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>furnace since I was a boy and had to do it every night
+and morning. It is so homey!”</p>
+
+<p>He opened the door, and the warm red glow came
+out and fell full on the girl’s face and bare shoulders,
+as she stood close beside him, peering in. He turned
+from the fire to look at her.</p>
+
+<p>“You <i>are</i> so beautiful!” he whispered.</p>
+
+<p>“Sh—, you mustn’t,” she answered. But her
+color rose and her eyes softened.</p>
+
+<p>“I must, I must!” he exclaimed. “I cannot help
+it any longer! You are so beautiful, and so good!
+If I’d stayed in New York I should be at the dinner
+of the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association.
+Now I’m gazing into Heaven with the most
+wonderful woman in the world!”</p>
+
+<p>“It doesn’t look exactly like Heaven,” she
+twinkled, pointing to the wallowing little spits of
+flame above the bed of coals, and moving a little
+from his side. “Come, we must go back!”</p>
+
+<p>He followed her reluctantly up the stairs, into the
+rear hallway. There, for a brief second, she faced
+him soberly.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m—I’m glad you are not at that horrid association
+you spoke of,” she whispered, and ran ahead
+swiftly into the sitting room.</p>
+
+<p>It was not long before the tree stood erect in the
+centre of the room, its top just bent against the ceiling;
+and poor Albert was ordered off to bed, refusing,
+however, to go unless Wallace carried him up on
+his shoulder and his aunt undressed him.</p>
+
+<p>“Auntie Nora lets me kick my shoes,” he explained.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>Wallace swung him up and marched up the stairs
+with him, Auntie Nora following behind. There
+was an open fire in the little chap’s nursery, and his
+stocking hung from the mantle. There were toys on
+the floor. When, a few moments later, he came
+dashing out from the bathroom in a long flannel
+nightie, followed by the girl, he ran to the fireplace
+and pinched the toe of the stocking. Then, instinctively,
+he held his hands out toward the blaze, and
+Wallace saw his Christmas card—saw the warm red
+firelight reflected on the little figure, the dangling
+stocking, the cold moonlight on a whitened world
+through the window beyond. He almost held his
+breath, whispering to the girl what it was that held
+him so in the picture.</p>
+
+<p>They stood side by side a moment, watching Albert,
+who was gazing in silence into the fire, his chatter
+suddenly stilled.</p>
+
+<p>“What are you thinking about, son?” said Wallace,
+presently.</p>
+
+<p>“I was thinking maybe Santa’d get his feet burnt
+if the fire didn’t go out,” Albert replied.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you say good night to Mr. Miller now, and
+go to bed,” his aunt laughed, “and we’ll put it out.”</p>
+
+<p>The boy ran over and flung his arms about Wallace’s
+neck, giving him a soft, dabby kiss on the
+cheek. “Good night!” he cried. Then he dashed
+into his chamber.</p>
+
+<p>When the girl came back, she found Wallace standing
+in front of the fire, looking into the coals. She
+came over and stood beside him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>“Come,” she said softly, “we must go down and
+decorate the tree.”</p>
+
+<p>He put out his hand and took hers, drawing her
+closer to his side.</p>
+
+<p>“That present,” he said, “I have not told you
+what it was. It was the gift of Christmas, it was the
+gift of a new spirit, it was the gift of my lost childhood—it
+was the gift of love.”</p>
+
+<p>She did not speak, but her hand lay warm in
+his, and her fingers closed a little tighter about his
+own.</p>
+
+<p>“When I suddenly saw my Christmas card right
+here in flesh and blood tonight,” he went on, “I was
+not surprised. It is but a symbol. Once I was the
+little boy on that card. Now I am my own father
+and mother looking at him. Last night I stood out
+there a long while before your windows, realizing
+that hearth and home are the altars of Christmas,
+alike its foundation and the flower of its spirit. I
+realized that, because love had entered my heart, because
+you had entered my heart. I have been so
+selfish these many years! I have not helped others,
+I have not liked children, I have been far away from
+all the deep, natural instincts. But you have brought
+me back. You have given me the present of a new
+spirit, the Christmas spirit.”</p>
+
+<p>“You were not really so selfish as you thought,”
+she whispered, “and you always loved children, only
+you didn’t have a chance to find it out. I knew that
+as soon as I saw you.”</p>
+
+<p>He put his arm about her waist and felt the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>perfume of her hair beneath his face, as her head
+rested on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“It is so short a time,” he said, “and I am so
+unworthy. Why should you care for me?”</p>
+
+<p>“It has been a very long time,” she answered
+softly. “I am not a child. I have known the man
+whom I should love, and only waited for him till he
+came, and till he, too, knew. That is what those intervening
+years were for—that we might learn.”</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her face, then, and he bent down his
+head and kissed her, while his eyes closed with the
+wonder of it.</p>
+
+<p>“Auntie Nora, I want a drink of water,” came
+the voice of Albert suddenly. “What are you whispering
+about in there?”</p>
+
+<p>“Maybe we were talking to Santa,” she answered,
+as she slipped from her lover’s arms and ran to get
+the water.</p>
+
+<p>Hand in hand, they moved down the stairway, and
+her eyes flashed back at him like two pools of happiness
+as she went ahead through the sitting-room door.</p>
+
+<p>The three women and Wallace spent a gay and
+busy hour hanging the tree with tinsel and candles
+and stars and presents. When it was nearly finished,
+Nora disappeared. Presently she came back with a
+parcel.</p>
+
+<p>“This is for you, from Mother and Albert,” she
+said to the man. “You ask Santa to put it in your
+stocking tonight.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, and come tomorrow morning and let me see
+what I’ve given you!” chuckled the old lady.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>Both Albert’s mother and grandmother had bidden
+him a Merry Christmas and gone upstairs to tie up
+the presents hidden away from the prying eyes of the
+youngster, when Wallace rose to leave. The girl
+stood in front of him, between the glittering tree and
+the fireplace. The red glow threw her beautiful
+body into high relief. She put her hand into the
+bodice of her gown and drew out a tiny parcel.</p>
+
+<p>“This is something for your stocking, too,” she
+said, “not from Albert nor Mother.”</p>
+
+<p>He took it tenderly. “And I have nothing for
+you,” he answered, “for you who have given me
+everything—who have given me life anew!”</p>
+
+<p>“I have given you nothing which I haven’t received
+back again,” she whispered, suddenly coming
+into his arms.</p>
+
+<p>Her lips were close to his ear in the doorway.
+“Merry Christmas, dear,” they said.</p>
+
+<p>He kissed her hair. “Those words mean more
+than I can utter now,” he answered. “I—I’m not
+used to saying them so. Oh, may the Author of
+Christmas guard and keep you!”</p>
+
+<p>He went down the path between the evergreens,
+and the moonlight poured a soft, golden glory on the
+white world, which had never seemed to him so
+beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>He hung up his stocking when he reached the hotel,
+and put his two presents into it. When morning
+came, he sprang out of bed, shut the window, turned
+on the steam, grabbed his stocking, and climbed back
+under the covers. He opened the parcel from Albert
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>and the old lady first, and drew forth a large barley
+sugar elephant, which he gave a slow, contemplative
+lick with his tongue, reviving memories of his childhood.
+Then he opened the other present, with
+fingers that bungled in their eagerness. It was a
+quaint and valuable old scarf pin, a ruby set in seed
+pearls, and wrapped around it was a tiny note.</p>
+
+<p>“This was my father’s. I have been keeping it
+for you, Dearest, on our first Christmas.”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace smoothed out the bit of paper and read
+it again and again, foolishly happy. Then he rose,
+beaming on the world in general, pinned an extravagant
+present for the chambermaid on his pillow, in
+an envelope labeled “Merry Christmas,” and went
+down to breakfast. As soon as the meal was over, he
+hastened out to the telegraph office, chuckling to himself,
+and sent five telegrams to the five members of
+the To-Hell-with-the-Merry-Yule-Tide Association.
+He wished that he had thought to send them the
+night before, to the dinner. But it was not too late
+even now. The five telegrams were alike. They all
+read—</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="large">Merry Christmas!</span></p>
+
+<p>“You can have eight more words for your money,”
+said the operator.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t need ’em,” he answered. “Those two
+will do the trick.” Then he hastened, almost running,
+up the street.</p>
+
+<p>Albert was already out in the front yard, pursuing
+his aeroplane over the snow, while the three women
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>stood in the windows, watching him. He rushed at
+Wallace to give him a hug and a “Merry Christmas,”
+and then dashed back to wind up the propeller again.
+The door opened as Wallace stepped upon the porch,
+and in the hall he felt, like a man in a dream, two
+arms about his neck, and another “Merry Christmas”
+whispered in his ear.</p>
+
+<p>In the sitting room the old lady came forward to
+greet him, regarding his face sharply. She took his
+hand in one of hers, and put the other on his
+shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“If my daughter hasn’t said it, I will say it for
+her,” she remarked—“this is so sudden! But I am
+too old a woman to be surprised at anything young
+folks will do. I believe you are a good man, for I
+have known many of both sorts and have never been
+fooled yet. Are you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Only negatively,” he answered, “till you showed
+me Christmas.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Christmas is a very good time to begin,”
+said the old lady. “Here is a present for you.”</p>
+
+<p>She brought him a token from the tree, while the
+younger women stood near him, the widow with her
+arm about Nora’s waist. He opened the package,
+and found within a beautiful old-fashioned watch fob,
+and a card, “From your new mother.” He knew
+instinctively that it had been her husband’s, and that
+its gift to him was a sacrifice not lightly made. In
+his eyes it linked him with the past, in hers it bound
+him with the future. He held this link of amethyst
+and gold in his hand, touched to silence, and then
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>walked over and kissed the old lady on the cheek,
+while she patted his hair with a little laugh that was
+suddenly half a sob, and the two younger women
+watched the scene tenderly, the one with soft, happy
+laughter, the other in silence and with a furtive
+glance through the window toward her son.</p>
+
+<p>He felt a great, heart-warming, new instinct to
+protect and guard them all, to keep inviolate the
+gentle atmosphere of this old room, to watch over the
+little chap who was playing and shouting out there in
+the snow. The mother presently went to the rear
+of the house to attend to her housekeeping, and as
+Wallace and Nora sat talking softly before the fire,
+he was aware of the elder sister looking wistfully at
+them from her seat at the window, where she could
+also keep an eye on Albert.</p>
+
+<p>“This is only her second Christmas without John,”
+the girl whispered. “Poor Marion! I feel almost
+selfish today in my new happiness.”</p>
+
+<p>Wallace watched the other woman steal softly
+from the room, and he saw that she was clenching her
+handkerchief in her hand, and biting her under lip.
+When she had gone, Nora slipped to a footstool, her
+hands crossed over her knees. He laid his hand
+gently on her hair.</p>
+
+<p>“All the deep mysteries of love and death and sorrow
+seem opening to me on this Christmas morning,”
+he said. “I don’t quite know whether to laugh or
+to cry.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl raised her face to his, and her own eyes
+were misty now.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>“Poor, poor Marion!” she said. “Oh, now I
+know what she has lost!”</p>
+
+<p>Her hands suddenly clasped him hard, as if he were
+about to slip away.</p>
+
+<p>Just then the front door opened, and Albert dashed
+into the room. The girl did not rise. He came over
+to them as if there were nothing unusual in their
+attitude, crying that his aeroplane had stuck in a
+tree out of his reach.</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll get it in a minute,” said Wallace, drawing
+the boy to him. As he held the little body close
+against his side, he looked down again at the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“And now I know, also, what she has found,” he
+whispered.</p>
+
+<p>The girl’s eyes looked into his for a reply, and
+Albert, awed by the silence, gazed from one to the
+other without speaking a word.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="transnote">
+<p class="ph1">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:</p>
+
+<p>Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.</p>
+
+<p>Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.</p>
+</div></div>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77821 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #77821
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77821)