LITMIR.BIZ

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      Once they came to a pair of bars which led into a meadow. The bars were of green timber and were very heavy. As he strained and tugged at them, she waited close behind him, dancing to the right and to the left so that there was a sound of mud-crystals being crushed under her tyrannical little fat feet.

      "Hurry, hurry, hurry!" she exclaimed with impatience. "We may run in the cold, but we must not stand still in the cold;" and she kicked him on the heels and pummelled him between the shoulders with her muff.

      "I am doing my best," he said, laughing heartily.

      "Your best is not good enough," she urged, laughing heartily likewise.

      "This bar is wedged tight. It's the sap that's frozen to the post. Look out there behind!"

      He stepped back, and, with a short run, lifted his leg and kicked the bar with his full strength. The recoil threw him backward to the ground, but he was quickly on his feet again; and as the bar was now loosened, he let it down for her. She stepped serenely through and without looking back or waiting trotted on. He put the bars up and with a spurt soon overtook her, for the meadow they were now crossing had been closely grazed in the autumn and there was better walking. They went up rising ground and reached one of those dome-like elevations which are a feature of the blue-grass country.

      Straight ahead of them half a mile away stood the house toward which they were hastening; a two-story brick house, lifted a little above its surroundings of yard and gardens and shrubbery and vines: an oak-tree over its roof, cedar-trees near its windows, ivy covering one of its walls, a lawn sloping from it to a thicket of evergreens where its Christmas Tree each year was cut.

      The children greeted with fresh enthusiasm the sight of this charming, this ideal place to which they were transferring their Christmas plans and pleasures – abandoning their own hearthstone. There lived their father's friend; there lived Harold and Elizabeth, their friends; and there lived the wife and mother of the household – the woman toward whom from their infancy they had been herded as by a driving hand.

      The tell-tale Christmas smoke of the land was pouring from its chimneys, showing that it was being warmed through and through for coming guests and coming festivities. At one end of the building, in an ell, was the kitchen; it sent forth a volume of smoke, the hospitable invitations of which there was no misunderstanding. At the opposite end was the parlor: it stood for the Spirit, as the kitchen for the honest Flesh: the wee travellers on the distant hilltop thought of the flesh first.

      They had no idea of the origin of the American Christmas. They did not know that this vast rolling festival has migrated to the New World, drawing with it things gathered from many lands and centuries; that the cooking and the feasting crossed from pagan England; that the evergreen with its lights and gifts came from pagan Germany; that the mystical fireside with its stockings was introduced from Holland; that the evergreen now awaiting them in the shut and darkened parlor of this Kentucky farm-house represented the sacred Tree which has been found in nearly every ancient land and is older than the Tree of Life in the literature of Eden.

      As far as they thought of the antiquity of the Christmas festival at all, it had descended straight from the Holy Land and the Manger of Bethlehem; this error now led to complications.

      The boy's crimson skull-cap had a peak which curled forward; and attached to this peak by several inches of crewel hung a round crimson ball about the size of the seed-ball of a sycamore. The shifting wind blew it hither and thither so that it buffeted him in the face and eyes. On this exposed height, especially, the wind raced free; and he ducked his head and turned his face sidewise toward her – an imp of winter joy – as he shouted across the gale: —

      "If people are still baking such quantities of cake in memory of Christmas after all these hundreds of years, don't you suppose, Elsie, that the Apostles must have been fearful cake-eaters? To have left such an impression on the world! Cake is a kind of sacred thing at home even yet, isn't it? A fine cake looks still as if it was baked for an Apostle! Doesn't it? Now doesn't it?"

      Elsie did not reply at once. Her younger brother was growing into the habit of saying unexpected things. Once after he had left the breakfast table, she had heard her father say to her mother that he had genius. Elsie was not positive as to all that genius comprised; but she at once decided that if she did not possess genius she did not wish genius. However she packed herself off to her room and thought further about this unpleasant parental discrimination.

      "If he has genius," she said finally, "at least he did not get it from them," and there was a triumph in her eye. "I see not the slightest sign of genius in either of them: he must have gotten it from our grandparents – never from them!"

      From that moment she had begun to oppose her mind to his mind as a superior working instrument in a practical world. Whenever he put forth a fancy, she put forth a fact; and the fact was meant to extinguish the fancy as a muffler puts out a candle. After a moment she now replied – with a mind that had repudiated genius: —

      "Nothing is said in the New Testament, my child, about cake. The only thing mentioned is loaves and fishes. But they do seem to have done an unconscionable amount of dining on bread and fish!" and Elsie had her own satirical laugh at the table customs of ancient Palestine as viewed from the Kentucky standard of the nineteenth century.

      The boy before replying deliberated as always.

      "They may not have had cake, but they had meat: because they said he sat with sinners at meat. I wonder why it was always the sinners who got the meat!"

      Elsie could offer no personal objection to this: Providence had ordained her to dwell in the tents of flesh herself.

      "How could they feed five thousand people on five loaves and two fishes? How could they? At one of those fish dinners!"

      "They did it!" said Elsie flatly. She saw the whole transaction with brilliant clearness – saw to the depths of the painted curtain. It was as naturally fact as the family four of them at breakfast that morning, fed on home-smoked sausages and perfectly digestible buckwheat cakes.

      "And twelve baskets of crumbs! That makes it worse! With bread for thousands everywhere, why pick up crumbs?"

      "Nothing is said about crumbs; they were fragments."

      "But if I've got to believe it, I've got to think how they did it! I've got to! If I can't think of it as it is, I must think of it as it isn't! But I can't do anything with the loaves; I give up the bread. However, I think those two fish might have been leviathans. That would be only two thousand five hundred people to each leviathan. Many of them might not have liked leviathan. I wouldn't have wanted any! They could have skipped me! They could have had my slice! And the babies – they didn't want much! Anyhow, that's the best I can do for the fish"; and he had his laugh also – not an incessant ripple like hers, but a music issuing from the depths of him through joy in the things he saw.

      Elsie made the reply which of late was becoming habitual in her talks with him.

      "Don't begin to be peculiar, Herbert. You are too young to be peculiar. Leave that to old people!" and Elsie's mind glided off from the loaves and the fishes of Galilee to certain old people of her neighborhood from whose eccentricities she extracted acrid amusement.

      The boy's words were not irreverent; irreverence had never been taught him; he did not know what irreverence was. They merely expressed the primary action of his mind in dealing with what to him was a wonder-story of Nature. And yet with this same mind which asked of wonder that it be reasonable, he was on his way to the celebration of Christmas Eve and to the story of the Nativity – the most joyous, the most sad, the most sublime Nature-story of mankind.

      His unconscious requirement was that this also must be reasonable; if it were not, he would accept the portions that were reasonable and reject the others as now too childish for his fore-handed American brain.

      They were nearing the end of their bitter walk. The little girl as she hurried forward now and then strained her eyes toward the opposite ends of the house ahead; at the kitchen smoke which promised such gifts to the flesh; at the window-shutters of the darkened parlor where the Christmas Tree stood, soon to be decorated with

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