Christmas | Page 4

through the
glass. It looks like it was a bigger light than we give it credit for."
"It's a big enough light," said Ebenezer, testily. It was his own plant at
the factory that made possible the town's three arc lights, and these had
been continued by him at the factory's closing.
"No use making fun of your friends' eyesight because you're all of
twenty minutes younger than them," Simeon grumbled. "Come on,
Abel. It must be gettin' round the clock."
Abel lingered.
"A man owns the hull thing with a glass o' this stamp," he said. "How
much does one like that cost?" he inquired.
"I'll sell you this one--" began Ebenezer; "wait a week or two and I may

sell you this one," he said. "I ain't really looked through it myself yet."
Not much after this, the two went away and left Ebenezer in the dark
yard.
He stood in the middle of his little grass plot and looked through his
glass again. That night there was, so to say, nothing remote about the
sky, save its distance. It had none of the reticence of clouds. It made
you think of a bed of golden bells, each invisible stalk trying on its own
account to help forward some Spring. As he had said, he did not know
one star from another, nor a planet for a planet with a name. It had been
years since he had seen the heavens so near. He moved about, looking,
and passed the wall of leafless lilacs and mulberries. Stars hung in his
boughs like fruit for the plucking. They patterned patches of sky. He
looked away and back, and it was as if the stars repeated themselves,
like the chorus of everything.
"You beggars," Ebenezer said, "awful dressed up, ain't you? It must be
for something up there--it ain't for anything down here, let me tell you."
He went up to his dark back door. From without there he could hear
Kate Kerr, his general servant, who had sufficient personality to
compel the term "housekeeper," setting sponge for bread, with a
slapping, hollow sound and a force that implied a frown for every down
stroke of the iron spoon. He knew how she would turn toward the door
as he entered, with her way of arching eyebrows, in the manner of one
about to recite the symptoms of a change for the worse--or at best to
say "about the same" to everything in the universe. And when Kate
Kerr spoke, she always whispered on the faintest provocation.
A sudden distaste for the entire inside of his house seized Ebenezer. He
turned and wandered back down the little dark yard, looking up at the
high field of the stars, with only his dim eyes.
"There must be quite a little to know about them," he thought, "if
anybody was enough interested."
Then he remembered Simeon and Abel, and laughed again in his way.

"I done the town a good turn for once, didn't I?" he thought; "I've fixed
folks so's they can't spend their money fool!"
Two steps from Ebenezer's front gate, Simeon and Abel overtook a
woman. She had a long shawl over her head, and she was humming
some faint air of her own making.
"Coming to the meeting, Mary?" Simeon asked as they passed her.
"No," said Mary Chavah, "I started for it. But it's such a nice night I'm
going to walk around."
"Things are going to go your way to that meeting, I guess," said
Simeon; "ain't you always found fault with Christmas?"
"They's a lot o' nonsense about it," Mary assented; "I don't ever bother
myself much with it. Why?"
"I donno but we'll all come round to your way of thinking to-night,"
said Simeon.
"For just this year!" Abel Ames called back, as they went on.
"You can't do much else, I guess," said Mary. "Everybody dips
Christmas up out of their pocketbooks, and if there ain't nothing there,
they can't dip."
The men laughed with her, and went on down the long street toward the
town. Mary followed slowly, under the yellowing elms that made great
golden shades for the dim post lamps. And high at the far end of the
street down which they went, hung the blue arc light before the Town
Hall, center to the constellation of the home lights and the shop lights
and the street lights, all near neighbours to the stream and sweep of the
stars hanging a little higher and shining as by one sun.

III

It was interesting to see how they took the proposal to drop that
Christmas from the calendar there in Old Trail Town. It was so
eminently a sensible thing to do, and they all knew it. Oh, every way
they looked at