so that it buffeted him in the face and eyes. On this exposed height, especially, the wind raced free; and he ducked his head and turned his face sidewise toward her—an imp of winter joy—as he shouted across the gale:—
"If people are still baking such quantities of cake in memory of Christmas after all these hundreds of years, don't you suppose, Elsie, that the Apostles must have been fearful cake-eaters? To have left such an impression on the world! Cake is a kind of sacred thing at home even yet, isn't it? A fine cake looks still as if it was baked for an Apostle! Doesn't it? Now doesn't it?"
Elsie did not reply at once. Her younger brother was growing into the habit of saying unexpected things. Once after he had left the breakfast table, she had heard her father say to her mother that he had genius. Elsie was not positive as to all that genius comprised; but she at once decided that if she did not possess genius she did not wish genius. However she packed herself off to her room and thought further about this unpleasant parental discrimination.
"If he has genius," she said finally, "at least he did not get it from them," and there was a triumph in her eye. "I see not the slightest sign of genius in either of them: he must have gotten it from our grandparents—never from them!"
From that moment she had begun to oppose her mind to his mind as a superior working instrument in a practical world. Whenever he put forth a fancy, she put forth a fact; and the fact was meant to extinguish the fancy as a muffler puts out a candle. After a moment she now replied—with a mind that had repudiated genius:—
"Nothing is said in the New Testament, my child, about cake. The only thing mentioned is loaves and fishes. But they do seem to have done an unconscionable amount of dining on bread and fish!" and Elsie had her own satirical laugh at the table customs of ancient Palestine as viewed from the Kentucky standard of the nineteenth century.
The boy before replying deliberated as always.
"They may not have had cake, but they had meat: because they said he sat with sinners at meat. I wonder why it was always the sinners who got the meat!"
Elsie could offer no personal objection to this: Providence had ordained her to dwell in the tents of flesh herself.
"How could they feed five thousand people on five loaves and two fishes? How could they? At one of those fish dinners!"
"They did it!" said Elsie flatly. She saw the whole transaction with brilliant clearness—saw to the depths of the painted curtain. It was as naturally fact as the family four of them at breakfast that morning, fed on home-smoked sausages and perfectly digestible buckwheat cakes.
"And twelve baskets of crumbs! That makes it worse! With bread for thousands everywhere, why pick up crumbs?"
"Nothing is said about crumbs; they were fragments."
"But if I've got to believe it, I've got to think how they did it! I've got to! If I can't think of it as it is, I must think of it as it isn't! But I can't do anything with the loaves; I give up the bread. However, I think those two fish might have been leviathans. That would be only two thousand five hundred people to each leviathan. Many of them might not have liked leviathan. I wouldn't have wanted any! They could have skipped me! They could have had my slice! And the babies—they didn't want much! Anyhow, that's the best I can do for the fish"; and he had his laugh also—not an incessant ripple like hers, but a music issuing from the depths of him through joy in the things he saw.
Elsie made the reply which of late was becoming habitual in her talks with him.
"Don't begin to be peculiar, Herbert. You are too young to be peculiar. Leave that to old people!" and Elsie's mind glided off from the loaves and the fishes of Galilee to certain old people of her neighborhood from whose eccentricities she extracted acrid amusement.
The boy's words were not irreverent; irreverence had never been taught him; he did not know what irreverence was. They merely expressed the primary action of his mind in dealing with what to him was a wonder-story of Nature. And yet with this same mind which asked of wonder that it be reasonable, he was on his way to the celebration of Christmas Eve and to the story of the Nativity—the most joyous, the most sad, the most sublime Nature-story of mankind.
His unconscious requirement was that this also must be reasonable; if it were not, he would accept the portions that were reasonable and reject the others as now too childish for his fore-handed American brain.
They were nearing the end of their bitter walk. The little girl as she hurried forward now and then strained her eyes toward the opposite ends of the house ahead; at the kitchen smoke which promised such gifts to the flesh; at the window-shutters of the darkened parlor where the Christmas Tree stood, soon to be decorated with presents: some for her—the little fat mercenary now approaching who was positive that during these days of preparation she had struck a shrewd bargain with the Immortal.
The boy, too, looked at these windows; but especially he looked at another between them, from which perhaps Elizabeth was watching for him.
Once he turned, and, walking backward, directed his gaze from this high point far across the country. Somewhere back there his father might now be stopping at a farm-house. A malignant disease was raging among the children of the neighborhood, some of whom were his schoolmates and friends; the holidays would bring no merry Christmas for them.
Wherever his father might be, there an influence started and came rushing across the landscape like the shadow of a cloud. It fell upon him, and travelled on toward the house he was approaching; it disappeared within the house and fell upon the woman who so wonderfully moved about in it: a chilling mysterious shadow that bound the three of them—his father and himself and this gentle woman—together in a band of darkness.
Then he faced about and ran on, longing the more ardently for Elizabeth: the path between him and Elizabeth lay before his nimble feet like a band of light.
II. When a Boy Finds Out About His Father
On the day preceding that twenty-fourth of December when his two weather-proof untrammelled children were rioting over the frozen earth, Dr. Birney met with an event which may here be set down as casting the first direct light upon him. Some reflected radiance may already have gone glancing in his direction from the luminous prattle of his offspring; some obscure glimpses must therein have bodied him forth: and the portraits that children unconsciously paint of people—what trained hand ever drew such living lines?
A short stretch across the country from his comfortable manor house there towered in stateliness one of the finest homesteads of this region; and in the great bedroom of this house, in the mother's bed, there had lain for days one of his patients critically ill, the only child of an intense mother who was herself no longer young.
Early that morning upon setting out he had driven rapidly to this house, gotten quickly out, and been quickly received through the front door thrown open to admit him. After examining the child, he had turned to the mother and spoken the words that are probably the happiest ever to fall from any tongue upon any ear:—
"He is out of danger. He is getting well."
At this intelligence the mother forgot the presence of another mother older than herself who had come to be with her during these vigils and anxieties. As the doctor, having spoken a few words to the nurse, passed out into
